Henry Kissinger's Huge but Deeply Problematic Legacy

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As you've been hearing in the news today, Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, died yesterday at the age of 100. The obits have been running along a spectrum, mostly of harsh, too harsher, too harshest, maybe the harshest headline is in Rolling Stone, which says, Henry Kissinger War Criminal Finally Dies. Go Google Kissinger obits for some samples of being willing to speak ill about the dead and right away.

One headline, somewhere on that spectrum is from an article that slates military and foreign affairs columnist Fred Kaplan wrote back in May when Kissinger had his 100th birthday. That headline read Henry Kissinger's Bloody Legacy. Fred Kaplan joins us now besides writing for Slate, he is author of books, including his latest, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, another nuclear weapons book from the 1980s called The Wizards of Armageddon, and one that Fred wrote in 2008 called Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.

We'll see if Henry Kissinger came up with any of those ideas. And we'll talk about Fred's 100th birthday article, which again was called Henry Kissinger's Bloody Legacy. Fred, thanks for coming on as always. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fred: Oh, good to be here as always.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote in that 100th candle power piece in May that Chile is the darkest blotch on Kissinger's legacy. We have generations of listeners who weren't around for Kissinger when he did whatever he did with Chile in 1973. You want to tell everybody about it?

Fred: Well, Chile elected in a fair and free election, a socialist Salvador Allende, and Kissinger basically plotted to overthrow him saying, "Why should we allow a socialist country in our hemisphere just because the people in the country were irresponsible?" Now, the reason why it's the darkest, it's not necessarily the most damaging thing that Kissinger did, but it's the one incident where the blame for what subsequently happened can be laid entirely on Kissinger. Many other things.

It could be Kissinger and Nixon or Kissinger and somebody else, but in this one, Nixon was actually about to have an appointment with a State Department underling of Kissinger's to talk about possibly forming some kind of modus vivendi with the Allende government. Kissinger got that meeting canceled and went to Nixon himself and convinced him that, no, we have to make the Chilean economy scream. Kissinger, who was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, became the chairman of a special committee, which consisted largely of CIA agents to overthrow the Chilean government.

They worked hand in hand with the Teamsters, which organized a big trucker strike in Chile so that the economy would scream. What ultimately happened is that Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet, who then launched a campaign to arrest and kill thousands of dissidents during which time Kissinger told him basically do what you need to do, and instructed the State Department not to issue any démarches against what he was doing. Later, Pinochet was found by the international courts to be a war criminal and was barred from many countries.

He was almost arrested once when he went to England. This is something-- oh, and one of the murders by Pinochet and his people took place in the streets of Washington DC. An exile economist named Orlando Letelier was blown up with a car bomb as his car drove by the Chilean embassy, killing him and an American colleague. There's never been any apologies for any of this.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's just what I was going to ask. If Kissinger ever expressed regret for empowering Pinochet and all that he brought?

Fred: Well, for one thing, the full extent of the US involvement in this wasn't even revealed until years later when Seymour Hersh uncovered it for The New York Times. It was denied until documents came out confirming it. Among many other things, Kissinger was actually a witty man, and often, he would just not address charges like this. Sometimes he would kind of dismiss it with a joke. For example, one time he said something like, "Illegal things, we do very quickly. Unconstitutional things, it takes a little longer." Everybody ha, ha, ha. He charmed people with this kind of thing. There have been whole books written about each one of the places in the world where Kissinger did dreadful things. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: One that people probably are not very familiar with that you said in your article is him being soft on a human rights violating coup in Pakistan, which you say led to the deaths of millions of millions of civilians. Millions?

Fred: Yes. Gary Bass wrote a book about just this sometime ago based on declassified documents. Yes, there was a coup in East Pakistan led by General Agha Muhammad Yahya. Because Pakistan was aligned with China against India, Kissinger did not want, and there's one memo where he tells his staff, "Don't squeeze Yahya." Nixon and Kissinger were both very complicit in what went on. They used American weapons to do what they did. The horrible thing is that things that happen in places like East Pakistan.

Another one was Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, which resulted in the deaths of about a hundred thousand civilians. These kinds of spots on the map tend to be overlooked. The politics involved are very complicated. I think there's probably some racial things that go into a lot of people just not taking a close look. Argentina was another case where there was a coup that he turned a blind eye to the excesses of killing thousands of dissidents and making them disappear. You might remember that phrase from the time.

In that instance, he told the foreign minister of Argentina, we would like you to succeed. That is to succeed in suppressing these dissidents. The bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, those are probably the deadliest things that he was involved in but there, he shares the stage--

Brian Lehrer: And probably the most well-known.

Fred: Yes, because we were involved in a war there at the time. Thousands of Americans were getting killed too. There, he shares responsibility for a war with President Nixon as well.

Brian Lehrer: He also shared a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Do you think that at least was deserved or that his escalation policies helped hasten the wars end in any way?

Fred: No, I think it's disgraceful. For one thing, it's long since been shown that when Nixon was running for president in '68 and Kissinger was signed on to be his National Security advisor, Kissinger arranged for communications to be sent to South Vietnam, whose leaders were engaged in peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris at the time, saying, "Don't negotiate. You'll get a better deal when Nixon is president." This was is why President Johnson was negotiating talks. There was progress in these talks.

Now, it may or may not be that those talks would've resulted in an end into the war, but Kissinger's communiqué to the South Vietnamese leaders to, "Hold on, don't take any deal now. You'll get a better one from Nixon." That very well could have prolonged the war by many years had tens of thousands of American deaths. Then the peace treaty that he did come up with, it wasn't really a peace treaty at all. It was just a way to provide cover for an American withdrawal and an almost instantaneous collapse of the South Vietnamese government listeners. That's one of the Nobel Prize is least stellar chapters.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any comments or questions about the legacy of Henry Kissinger who died yesterday at the age of 100 for Fred Kaplan from Slate? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. I think TJ in Manhattan wants to bring up something that he says Kissinger said very recently. TJ, you're on WNYC. Hello.

TJ: Good morning to you and to your guest. I'm calling about recently during the war between Russia and Ukraine, Kissinger went to President Zelensky of Ukraine and told him to calm down the Russian by giving up all the Donetsk area where the Russia basically invaded and told him to give it to them. Zelensky was extremely angry and said, "No way." The idea was extremely mocked. That prove that Kissinger is not the smart guy everybody wants to talk about.

Brian Lehrer: TJ, thank you very much. Do you have anything Fred on him taking a position on Ukraine-Russia?

Fred: In some fairness, this is an article he wrote for the Financial Times, I think. He talked about making a trade of land for security, and he said that as part of this deal, Ukraine would be allowed into NATO, but yes, it would give up some land. In some fairness, it may well be that if this war ever does end, the deal of that sort might be what ends up getting struck, but for the moment, for someone as prominent as Kissinger to come up with a suggestion like this could really only have the effect of emboldening Putin to stay away from any negotiating table under the possibility that he might get a better deal down the road.

At some point, there are some good things that Kissinger did and we should talk about that at some point as well.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, that's where I was going to go next to something that I think you would consider a good thing. Kissinger was on this show in 2011 when he wrote a book called On China. Another part of his legacy that you may have just been referring to was leading President Nixon to his famous opening to China and trip to China. I asked Kissinger about criticism he got from the right at that time for his policies of détente with Russia and China, rather than taking a harder line like when President Reagan came into office in the following decade and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." This is the China part of Kissinger's answer.

Henry Kissinger: No. As far as China is concerned, the opening to China did not legitimize Mao was in office. The common consensus at the period was followed by every other democratic government and preceded by other democratic governments that China needed to be brought into the international system if one was going to have progress towards peace. The idea that we should have added a confrontation with China to a crisis in Vietnam is something that's easy to do in 2011. It was not a thoughtful policy then.

Brian Lehrer: Henry Kissinger here in 2011 when he was only 88. How do you think of that side of Kissinger's legacy, Fred?

Fred: That's certainly one of his-- for the most part, positive legacies. Bringing China into the international system was a major boon both to getting people, millions out of poverty in China, and also some economic development within the rest of the world. Now, and also Kissinger also meant it, as did Nixon, as a game of triangular politics with Russia joining up with China to put more pressure on the Soviet Union and trying to use it as some leverage in the Vietnam War, which had no effect whatsoever.

What happened later though was that when it turned out that by joining the international system, China was becoming stronger, but it was not adopting democratic ways, and it was engaging in unfair trade practices and things like that, Kissinger remained a cheerleader for China, excusing them for everything that they did. His death was-- the Chinese government praised him as a friend of the Chinese people. Well, he wasn't a friend of the Chinese people. He was a very good friend of the Chinese Communist Party for justifying everything that they did.

He had lots of contracts with what was called Kissinger Associates, where his alliance with China paid plenty of bounties. No, it was a major, major thing and it transformed world politics mainly in a good way, but when this started to have some negative side effects. Henry Kissinger was not any of those, even trying to pressure the Chinese government quietly to back off on some of its practices.

Brian Lehrer: Carolina in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Carolina.

Carolina: Hi. Hi, Brian. Long time, first time. I'm calling because last night, right after I read the news, my mother called me on a video call. My mother's from Chile. She grew up in Santiago and she was a teenager in 1973 when the coup happened. Her family's house, she grew up just a few blocks from the National Stadium, which anybody knows the history of the coup and the stadium, there were just mass executions there. One of the worst, most notorious terror cells was just a few blocks away from her home. 1973 was awful for many reasons.

We had family that had to flee the country to go to East Germany and there was a moment where my grandmother hid a cousin in the home because she knew that she was going to be likely be murdered before she was able to escape. That's the background for this. When I told my mom, she didn't know. I said, "Mommy, did you know that Kissinger just died?" To be honest, I didn't even know he was still alive, but when I told her he just died, he was 100, he lived to see 100, and he caused the death of so many youth, and just looking at her face, the relief, and she started to weep.

This was 50 years ago, but the pain that he caused so many people, it was something to behold seeing how she reacted to the news of this man has finally left this earth after all of the pain he caused.

Brian Lehrer: Such a powerful story and personal like that. Carolina, thank you so much. Wow, Fred.

Fred: Well, you could go into certain countries that don't have big blips on our radar screen and find lots of people who would tell similar stories and very few people telling opposite stories actually.

Brian Lehrer: John in East Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm with the East Timor Action Network, and Kissinger has been our white whale, so to speak, since we were founded. He and Ford gave the green light to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, literally the day before the invasion was launched. That quote about the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a bit longer is from a minute of a meeting I think the following March where they're discussing how to keep the weapons flow from the US to Indonesia despite US laws that say countries that invade or allies that invade other countries are supposed to get their weapons cut off.

Since we're talking death tolls here, the estimates are 100,.000 to 200,000. East Timorese died as a result of US-backed invasion of East Timor by Indonesia.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you for making that a little more well-known to many of our listeners who may never have heard of East Timor or known of that invasion. [crosstalk] Go ahead, Fred.

Fred: Now, the notes that you refer to in this meeting, Kissinger addresses the fact that it would be illegal to send arms to Indonesia for an invasion. He said, "Well, if we can refer to this action as self-defense, then we could get it done," and he instructed his legal staff to come up with some completely nonsense way of justifying the Indonesian government's action as self-defense. In that case, he knew it was illegal and just manipulated the facts to allow it.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, despite everything we've been talking about, didn't all the presidents, even after Nixon and Ford, who he officially served, including all the Democrats through Obama use him as an advisor and maybe even Biden?

Fred: Yes, but I don't know how seriously, actually. I mean, in some ways, it was almost an initiation rite where it shows that you're a serious on foreign policy, but you sit down with the most serious-sounding foreign policy specialist in the United States. I know that in his long article, his long set of interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama had very disparaging things to say about Kissinger and his impact on the world. Hey, listen, you're right. Even if some presidents did this more for show, it was a show to everybody else.

It perpetuated this perception that this guy was a great mind and a great statesman and somebody to look up to, and to call for advice. It also perpetuated. This is where it really counts. He formed this think tank, it wasn't really a think tank, it was called Kissinger Associates. He advised foreign governments and was paid by foreign governments. The fact that he was being greeted into the Oval Office by every president and at least seemingly asked for advice, strengthened his standing among clients.

They thought that when we hire Kissinger, not only are we getting this brilliant foreign policy thinker, but we're getting somebody who has an in into the White House. We are going to use him, we could use him as a vehicle for influence, forgetting our views across. In that sense, the show, theatrics in which these presidents were complicit misled leaders in other countries as well.

Brian Lehrer: You could have a flip side of that and ask, why did US presidents take advice and continue to take advice from somebody who they knew was being paid by foreign governments to press their interests on us?

Fred: That's a good question.

Brian Lehrer: I want to read one more thing before you go. I also asked Kissinger when he was on the show that day in 2011, a question about his childhood and its influence on his approach to foreign policy. Here's a little of that beginning with part of my question. You were a refugee from the Nazis. You served in the US military and hazardous intelligence duty during World War II. People rarely talk about that part of your life.

Henry Kissinger: Before that, in hazardous infantry duty, and then in hazardous intelligence duty.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Since you came of age at that time, can you put into words what, if anything, the horror of Nazism did to shape your worldview or your desire to work in foreign policy?

Henry Kissinger: Look, Hitler came to power when I was barely nine years old. From that point on, the Jewish community in Germany was segregated and came under increasing pressure excluded from public places. Then in time under physical attack, and as kids, you were immediately under physical attack because every Hitler youth boy could beat you up in the street. That was the reality that I saw a world disintegrate. I have tried to devote my life to promoting peace as I understood it, as I've just explained it to you and also to try to heal divisions in this country.

One reason, some on the left and some on the right are attacking me because they think I ought to belong to them. I try to take a position that stands above these disputes.

Brian Lehrer: Henry Kissinger here in 2011, obviously relevant today as we watch antisemitism come out in frightening ways. Fred also kind of mind-boggling that he positioned his lesson from growing up in Nazi Germany to be someone who worked for peace, given everything we've been talking about regarding his legacy. Any reaction to that clip or Kissinger positioning himself as a pragmatist, not left or right?

Fred: Yes. Very interesting. The thing to sum up about Kissinger's worldview, which is reflected also in some books that he wrote both before and after he was in power, some of which are very good by the way. He was the kid of a key figure in the Realpolitik School of International Studies, which is the idea that you don't focus on morality so much, as in maintaining a balance of power in following your own national security interests, and recognizing that other countries followed their national security interests.

I'm sure that there was a whole generation of scholars coming out of World War II that thought that the way that you maintain the peace is not through these hyper-idealistic visions of a world government or international law as followed World War I, but to maintain the balance of power and keeping deterrence through strength, that sort of thing. He did have that going for him. However, most of the other practitioners or theorists of the Realpolitik School, and I'm thinking of people like George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz.

How does their underlying premises something about American values? Kennan said who invented the whole idea of containment against the Soviet Union. The idea was that you have a long persistent patience in containing the Soviet Union, and in the meantime, making your own system look appealing so that people actually come over to the American side. That's one reason, that's one way that we did defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, did that the way you're describing it, Kissinger's relationship with Realpolitik, as that's called, come up in your book, How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power or did he come up in either of your books on nuclear weapons? Real briefly.

Fred: He changed his mind on nuclear weapons. In the 1950s, he thought that you could use battlefield nuclear weapons to defeat the Soviet Union at a battlefield. Later, he said, no, it would probably escalate all the way to nuclear, and therefore, it was a proponent of building up a conventional defense. Actually, my book, Daydream Believers is mainly about the neocons of which he is not a member who thought that you could use very moralistic pronouncements about the United States to advance our power. He was actually on the other side of that, but what I was going to say--

Brian Lehrer: Does that mean he was against George Bush's Iraq war?

Fred: Well, he says that he was privately, but he wasn't publicly. He supported, I can't think of a single American intervention that he publicly spoke out against.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column for Slate. He wrote on the occasion of Henry Kissinger's 100th birthday earlier this year, a Slate article, which is now being recirculated, called Henry Kissinger's Bloody Legacy. Fred, thank you so much.

Fred: Anytime.

 

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