The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss
He was a brilliant charming German emigré who played important roles in the U.S. Government for decades. He was lionized and fawned over by the American media as a visionary genius.
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| Some criticized Henry's Cambodia policy |
He was also a war criminal.
His name was Wernher von Braun. Whom did you think we were talking about?
We mention the father of the Nazi V-2 rocket, built by Jewish slave labor and aimed at British civilians in the waning days of the Second World War, who went on to fame and fortune advising NASA and later CBS News only to point out the soft spot that we seem to have for certain types of telegenic war criminals with a charming German accent.
Which brings us to war criminal Henry Kissinger, who finally met the Grim Reaper this week, aged 100. Of course Henry and ol' G.R. went back decades, to Kissinger's days bombing the s*** out of helpless civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam for no purpose other than to advance the political fortunes of his boss, paranoid hypocrite and great mainstream Republican Richard M. Nixon.
His litany of monstrous deeds is long and terrible, but they all have a common denominator: they were carried out to pursue his own relentless and insatiable quest for power and glory, principally by ingratiating himself with those even more powerful, like the devious paranoid Richard M. Nixon.
He proved his worth to Nixon by helping sabotage the Paris Peace Talks before the 1968 election, thus greasing the way for Nixon's election. (The following litany is plagiarized from David Korn's helpful summary in Mother Jones.)
As Nixon's National Security Adviser, he took control of the national security apparatus to lethal effect. His mission was to prolong the already lost Vietnam War until Nixon could extricate U.S. forces without the immediate collapse of the Saigon regime (That happened on Kissinger's watch in 1975, but not until Nixon had resigned in disgrace.).
The strategy was to replace American casualties with Indochinese ones. That led to the illegal secret and then not so secret bombing of Cambodia, designed to cover withdrawal of U.S. troops. It also led to several hundred thousand dead Cambodians and the replacement of the neutral regime with the bloodthirsty self-genocidal Pol Pot tyranny. In 1970, Nixon and Kissinger ordered the invasion of Cambodia, resulting in yet another pointless effusion of blood.
To grease Nixon's re-election in 1972, he falsely stated weeks before the election that peace in Vietnam was “at hand,” which it was not. He and Nixon then ordered a massive bombing of North Vietnam over Christmas, the objective of which was to persuade the South Vietnamese dictator that the United States would always be willing to unleash fire and fury to prop up that puppet regime. Thieu was just dumb enough to fall for it.
He backed the illegal coup in Chile, which replaced a democratically elected President with a cruel military junta who later got away with assassinating a U.S. citizen in the middle of Washington, D.C. Later he supported an even more bloodthirsty gang of butchers in Argentina despite their campaign of torture and assassination directed at anyone who dared defend democracy. And let's not forget his support of dictatorships in Bangladesh and Indonesia that led to several hundred thousands more butchered.
No wonder Mr. Korn arrived at this judgment of the undear departed:
It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands were drenched in blood.
We'll get back to Kissinger's supposed mastery of the universe, but first let's check in with the descendants of the victims of his bloody deeds:
Kissinger, serving under President Richard Nixon first as national security advisor and then secretary of state, directed the carpet bombing of broad swaths of Cambodian territory where, he said, Vietnamese communist soldiers were hiding out.
In an now-infamous excerpt from a transcript of phone calls in 1970, Kissinger relays Nixon’s order for an expanded bombing to his assistant, Gen. Alexander Haig.
“He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done,” Kissinger said. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”
The bombing began as a covert operation against a neighboring state. It killed at least 50,000 civilians, but likely many, many more, and destabilized the country.
“That really laid the foundation for the Khmer Rouge genocide,” said Vesna Nuon, one of Lowell’s three Cambodian-American city councilors. “They used [the bombing] as propaganda and a tool for recruiting a large group of Cambodians to join them.”
The 60-year old Nuon recalled that as a child in Cambodia, he sometimes overheard his father and his father’s friends discussing Kissinger in the early 1970s. “My father would talk about how bitter he was and how Kissinger and the others who planned [the bombing] got away with it for a long time,” he said.
With a record of atrocity and duplicity like Kissinger's, why did he enjoy such a glorious reputation as a diplomat, not to mention as a supposed genius?
He was great at sucking up to superiors who might be in a position to advance his career or line his pockets. His patron McGeorge Bundy overruled the objections of Harvard's Government Department to award Henry an undeserved tenured professorship. His endless flattery of Nixon gave him untrammeled power. His lifelong affectation of a thick German accent not shared by any other contemporaneous emigré gave him a Strangelovian air of omniscience.
His diplomatic genius was supposedly evidenced by the opening to China in 1969. Actually, the credit goes to Nixon and his fellow Cold Warriors, whose decades of persecution of anyone advocating a normal relationship with post-1949 China cowed Democrats for decades. It was Democratic terror of what they feared Republicans would brand as a victory for “Red China” that led them to freeze out China and then pursue the Vietnam War right off the cliff.
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| If you seek his monument, look around |
Later he made some arms control deals with the Soviet Union, again because Democrats would have been pilloried by Kissinger's patrons had they tried the same gambit.
Although he then made big bucks peddling influence and prestige to whatever loathsome regime would employ him, like the dismemberment artists of Saudi Arabia, in fact by 1980 his real power had ended.
The Reaganites never had any use for Henry, believing him to have been too soft on Communism (file under: The Postman Always Rings Twice). He tried to worm his way in by leading a ridiculous commission on El Salvador, whose work product was variously mocked and ignored. Later Democratic Administrations, aware of his stench, kept him at arms' length. Only in the minds of gullible journalists was he perceived as the all-powerful seer – the Karnak the Magnificent of Fifth Avenue.
His genius was widely reported but, except for his skill at manipulation and dissimulation, never seen. His supposed academic masterpiece, arguing for “limited” nuclear war as a realistic Cold War option was fatuous, dangerous and just plain wrong. In fact it was so stupid that it was one of the only things he ever did that he repudiated.
Ultimately the most disturbing questions about this loathsome non-genius was the unearned reputation he enjoyed throughout his life. How could people who were thought to have both intelligence and integrity be sucked into this transparently evil web?
We don't have an answer. We do note that similar undeserved deference was later extended to the next generation of Republican war criminals in the aughts and today to craven bent Republicans devoted to insurrection and white supremacy.
Maybe we need to stop listening to the great white moderate men sonorously telling us to defer to the great and the good. Maybe we need to listen to those like, for example, antiwar liberal Americans who were right about Henry 50 years ago, right about the Iraq War debacle, and right today about the subversive nature of today's Republican Party and the threat to democracy that they pose.
You won't get tenure at Harvard or even an invitation to dinner at Mo Dowd's by holding those views. But you won't be drenched in blood and hypocrisy, like dead Henry Kissinger and his thousands of apologists and bootlickers.
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