His post-mortem public relations campaign must not stand.
Before leaving office, former President Barack Obama reflected upon the destructive inheritance Henry Kissinger had bequeathed upon U.S. foreign policy some four decades earlier. Obama recalled wrestling with that legacy throughout his time in the White House, the spoilage extending far beyond what American citizens still refer to as the Vietnam War.
“So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Obama told The Atlantic in March 2016, “and yet, ultimately . . . all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”
His post-mortem public relations campaign must not stand.
“When I go to visit those countries,” Obama continued, “I’m going to be trying to figure out how we can, today, help them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In what way did that strategy promote our interests?”
In 1969, incoming President Richard M. Nixon (for whom Kissinger served first as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State) inherited a deeply divided country.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, Washington policymakers too often sought to justify a string of highly questionable, when not illegal and/or immoral, foreign adventures around the world. Among the most notable are Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, and Indonesia and the Dominican Republic, as well as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s. The blowback continues to this day.
Former Republican Vice President Nixon’s election, however, signaled a new level in the bankruptcy of American values and practices, and a shocking disrespect for international laws and norms. The high point for the United States both in developing binding norms in international criminal law and in making foreign policy coherent with fundamental American principles, arguably came at the end of World War II with the trials of a fistful of high-ranking German Nazis in Nuremberg, and a similar judgment in Tokyo against Japan’s military leadership.
David Hume Kennery/National Archives/Public Domain
Kissinger in the White House West Wing, 1975.
Running to succeed President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, Nixon secretly sabotaged the Democrats’ efforts to bring the Vietnam War to an end by engaging in peace talks in Paris with North Vietnam. Having called Nixon “the most dangerous of all the men running to [be] president” only months before, Kissinger then served as a key informant to Nixon and his campaign at a critical time, funneling inside information about the negotiations using contacts from his time working as a U.S. adviser in South Vietnam. While still president, Johnson privately called the perfidy in which Kissinger was involved “treason.”
Kissinger was a German Jew whose family escaped Nazi rule at the beginning of what became the Holocaust. While working for Nixon and then for the unelected President Gerald Ford, a privately vicious and publicly vain Kissinger carried out a laundry list of clandestine domestic and international illegal activities for which he was never held accountable.
At home, he instigated spying on colleagues and journalists, committed perjury, was a master leaker, crushed human rights and national security whistleblowers, and complained bitterly about fellow U.S. diplomats (one of whom, he whined, was a “stupid” woman deserving particularly rough treatment) to a senior official of a foreign dictatorship that had already committed terrorist attacks abroad, including in our nation’s capital. At the same time, Kissinger also conspired against Jimmy Carter, a sitting U.S. president who restored human rights to the American agenda, by counseling the Chilean dictatorship to hold firm and wait out the Georgia Democrat until after the 1980 presidential campaign. International ethics scholar Zach Dorfman revealed that Kissinger privately “laud(ed) Chile’s decision to stymie a murder trial related to a major act of international terrorism carried out in the U.S. capital.”
Abroad, Kissinger’s tally of hundreds of thousands of bodies of unarmed civilians, many having been rounded up into concentration camps modeled after those of Nazi Germany, led respected international human rights organizations to call for his prosecution for war crimes. Under Kissinger, the legacy established in Nuremberg was trampled.
Oliver F. Atkins/U.S. NARA
Kissinger, Nixon, and then-U.S. Army chief of staff Alexander Haig discuss Vietnam at Camp David in 1972.
The United States left Vietnam five years after Nixon was elected, with some 21,041 more Americans and more than two million more Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians dead. There was nothing decent or moral about the “decent interval” Kissinger sought between when the United States abandoned South Vietnam and when our erstwhile allies were defeated. The former chief prosecuting counsel at the Nuremberg trials, U.S. Army General Telford Taylor, called the Nixon policy orchestrated by Kissinger of air strikes against hamlets suspected of containing Vietnamese guerrillas “flagrant violations of the Geneva convention on civilian protection.”
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger in June 1976 in Santiago, Chile.
In what is now known as Bangladesh, Nixon and Kissinger sided with a genocidal Pakistani military, approving illegal arms shipments while at least 300,000 people were being killed.
Halfway around the world, in democratic Chile, as the head of the overall U.S. intelligence network, Kissinger quarterbacked the covert destabilization of a newly elected socialist government, then immediately recognized the far-right military dictatorship that came to power in a bloody coup. Thousands were killed, tens of thousands of others tortured and imprisoned and General Augusto Pinochet’s official international terrorist network carried out the worst attack in Washington, D.C., until 9/11.
David Hume Kennerly/Ford Library
Kissinger and Gerald Ford meet with Suharto in Jakarta on December 6, 1975, the day before the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.
Working for President Ford, in 1975 Secretary of State Kissinger secretly gave the green light to Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military to invade East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, which resulted in more than 100,000 East Timorese murdered or starved to death.
Less than a year later, Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-Nazi generals a “green light” for their dirty “war” in which as many as 20,000 mostly unarmed people were abducted, held in concentration camps, and secretly murdered, with Jews being a favored target. (Faced with being brought to trial in a civilian court, one far-right general complained he and his once-clandestine colleagues faced “Nuremberg in reverse.”)
Bolivia, Cyprus, the Kurds, South Africa, Uruguay, Zimbabwe . . . the Kissinger hit list is long, its smoldering ruins running to the present day, and it has both Republican and Democratic disciples.
Kissinger’s vast web of lies and misdeeds permitted him to use his positions of public trust inside and out of government for long-running grift for his own personal benefit and that of his corporate patrons and select minions.
Another part of Kissinger’s enduring legacy is that the military-industrial complex of yesteryear has become an important part of what Kissinger Associates recently warned about artificial intelligence (AI)—taking on a life of its own. What is needed is an international activist campaign to ensure that Kissinger is remembered at home and abroad for who he really was.
No federal property should be allowed to be named in Kissinger’s honor, including U.S. naval ships, weapons, post offices, and national parks. No federal funds should be authorized to those colleges and universities who name their school properties or programs after him. A complete revision of public-school curricula should reflect the truth of his time as a public servant, and no federal statutes should be erected in the war criminal’s name. (Just as statues of Confederate generals and other such monuments served as symbols of white supremacy to threaten African Americans, so too would Kissinger memorials validate his treacherous crimes.) The Democratic Party platform adopted at next year’s national convention in Chicago must incorporate, at a minimum, these specific proposals.
“It sickened me that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death on the basis of a cheap whim.”—Patricia Derian
On the international level, other governments should forbid any U.S. ships, airplanes, and other vehicles, bearing Kissinger’s name from their waters or airspace. In addition, a recorded vote should be taken in the United Nations General Assembly where Member States require that all U.N. peacekeepers be taught about the true legacy of Kissinger.
“It sickened me,” said Patricia Derian, Carter’s State Department point person on human rights and the official whom Kissinger once called a “stupid” woman when speaking to Pinochet’s foreign minister three years after the Letelier-Moffitt murders in Washington, D.C., “that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death on the basis of a cheap whim. As time went on, I saw Kissinger’s footprints in a lot of countries. It was the repression of a democratic ideal.”
It is time to say, “Nunca mas!” (Never more.)