Kissinger’s Shadow (11 page)

Kissinger was effective with liberal critics. With religious folk, he could invoke his experience in the Holocaust. With reporters, he could flatter and leak and stroke their egos. And with students, he cultivated a compelling mix of irony and candor. One remembers a performance Kissinger gave at MIT, in late January 1971.
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He started his remarks “with a confidential air,” telling the audience that Nixon had not been his “first choice” for president. Then, after a dramatic pause, he confessed “that he had doubts, that he was troubled, yet confident that the Administration had chosen the only sensible path”—gradual withdrawal and “Vietnamization.” As to rumors that the administration was considering using nuclear weapons (rumors that turned out to be true), Kissinger “made a disparaging remark about absurd scenarios that might be found in the lower offices of the Pentagon, but the real decision makers would never use those terrible weapons.”
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Asked by one skeptical student what it would take for him to resign, Kissinger said: when the “whole trend of the policy became morally reprehensible to me.” But, he added, he wouldn't criticize the president publicly “unless gas chambers were set up or some horrendous moral outrage.”

Recalling the encounter at a later date, the unconvinced student wondered, “What if … there is no need to build ovens? What if … the ovens are the infernos created by the napalm and the bombs from the B-52s?”

Kissinger had largely won over the young crowd. “He had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us,” said the student. Yet even as Kissinger was lying that the war was winding down, B-52s were pounding southern Laos to prepare for a ground invasion, which took place on the Monday after Kissinger's Saturday MIT speech.

Kissinger was equally good with liberal intellectuals. He pulled them in, letting them think they had an audience. He often lunched with Arthur Schlesinger, and every time he did he let the historian in on a secret: he was thinking about resigning. “I have been thinking a lot about resignation,” he said following the invasion of Cambodia. “In fact, I thought about it long before Cambodia.” Again, Schlesinger didn't know about the bombing of Cambodia or about Kissinger's deep involvement in planning the invasion. Neither was Schlesinger aware of Kissinger's plotting with the president to “destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” So it was possible for him to take Kissinger seriously when he said he stayed on to prevent further damage to “institutions of authority.”
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And even if Kissinger couldn't convince liberal and left-wing intellectuals about the soundness of Nixon's policy, they were still reassured that someone at ease with concepts such as “bourgeois society,” “objective conditions,” and “structural crisis” was in the White House. His “soul was conservative,” as his mentor Fritz Kraemer once said, meaning he valued hierarchy and order. But his mind was formed by many of the influences that shaped the New Left, including existential exaltations of individual free will. Kissinger appreciated history's sweep, possessing a dialectical instinct that some compared to Hegel's (“Henry thinks in a constantly theoretical framework. Every time a wave occurs on the east end of the shore, he's got it tied into a relationship with the west bank,” said one academic admirer he brought into the NSC as an analyst).
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“The West,” he wrote in his undergraduate thesis, “has produced no political theorist with an ability to reach the souls since Marx.”
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That Kissinger was essentially a New Left mind with Old Right morals wasn't lost on Alexander Haig, who described him to Nixon as someone “cut from that goddamn … left wing [cloth] even though he's a hard-line, tough guy.”
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And when the wit and good wine came up short, Kissinger deftly invoked fear of right-wing revanchism: “If we had done in our first year what our loudest critics called on us to do,” Kissinger told the MIT audience, “the 13 percent that voted for Wallace would have grown to 35 or 40 percent; the first thing the president set out to do was to neutralize that faction.”
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Kissinger, who as a child witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic, presented himself as holding the center against the right, telling liberals that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would be making foreign policy. If there were to be a revolution in America, he warned, it wouldn't be led by Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, pacifist Quakers, or social-justice Catholics and Jews. When a society truly collapses, Kissinger said, “some real tough guys,… the most brutal forces in the society take over.”
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“We are saving you from the right,” he told NSC staffers who had resigned in protest over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. “You are the right,” they replied.
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The 1971 invasion of Laos—carried out with 17,000 South Vietnamese troops and massive US air strikes—was another catastrophe. It was meant to shut down the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, over which Hanoi supplied the Vietcong. But the North Vietnamese army routed the South Vietnamese, killing or wounding nearly 8,000 of the attackers. The United States lost over 100 helicopters and 215 soldiers. But Nixon spun the invasion as a success. He told Haldeman: “We should whack the opponents on patriotism, saving American lives, etc.”
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When the press began to report accurately the unfolding disaster, Kissinger took the opportunity to stoke Nixon's anger: the media's reporting on Laos, he said, was “vicious.” Never at a loss for a useful historical analogy, Kissinger told Nixon that if “Britain had a press like this in World War II, they would have quit in '42.”

Foreign policy was turned inside out, with Nixon and Kissinger keying their actions not to external reality but rather to their need to manipulate domestic opinion. In the real world, the invasion of Laos was a failure. But as Nixon told Kissinger, the real world didn't matter. “The main thing, Henry, on Laos,” he said, “I don't care what happens there, it's a win. See?”
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“To listen to even a few of the Nixon tapes,” write the historians Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, “is to be struck by the degree to which foreign policy options were evaluated in terms of their likely effect on the administration's standing at home.”
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Here are two examples. The first is from March 1971, when Kissinger told Nixon that “we've got to get enough time to get out. We have to make sure that they don't knock the whole place over” (that is, make sure North Vietnam didn't overrun South Vietnam as soon as the United States withdrew its troops). “We can't have it knocked over brutally, to put it brutally, before the election.” Then on August 3, 1972, Nixon: “I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam probably is never going to survive anyway, I'm just being perfectly candid.… We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important. It's terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That's the real question.” Kissinger replied: “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it's the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.” Kissinger then went on to say that “we've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater.” Having helped prolong the war to get Nixon elected, Kissinger was now working to prolong it—until he could reach a face-saving agreement—to get him reelected.
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Nixon, though, was afraid that Kissinger would be tempted to strike a deal and bask in the praise he would receive as a peacemaker. He told Haig to keep watch. The president, Haldeman wrote in his diary, “wants to be sure Haig doesn't let Henry's desire for a settlement prevail, that's the one way we can lose the election. We have to stand firm on Vietnam and not get soft.”
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Kissinger mostly stayed firm. But by early 1972, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Nixon's and Kissinger's strategy of withdrawing troops while escalating the bombing wasn't working. Soon, writes Larry Berman in his detailed history of the Paris negotiations, the White House would capitulate “on almost every major point” Hanoi was insisting on, including that “any cease-fire would be a ‘cease-fire in place,' that is, North Vietnamese troops would stay in the South if they were already there.”
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Fighting, nonetheless, continued. The North launched a major offensive at the end of March, and Nixon responded with a massive bombing campaign: Haldeman wrote in his diary that Nixon was massing a huge attack force, still hoping, against all evidence, that another whack “will give us a fairly good chance of negotiations” and force concessions out of Hanoi. “Henry has the same view.”
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At this point, the bombing had as much to do with conciliating the small group of true believers that had hardened around Nixon in the White House as it did the broader Right. “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” Kissinger had said earlier, amid making plans for one of his savage blows that was supposed to end the war. Kissinger told the Soviet ambassador that Vietnam had become a “major domestic problem.” He continued: “We cannot permit our domestic structure to be constantly tormented by this country ten thousand miles away.”
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Confronted with an opponent he could not bend, Kissinger had come to think of the United States as the tormented victim.

By late spring, the negotiating momentum had swung to the North Vietnamese. On May 2, Kissinger sat down in Paris with North Vietnam's main representative, Le Duc Tho, in a meeting he described as “brutal.” “Le Duc Tho was not even stalling,” Kissinger said. “Our views had become irrelevant; he was laying down terms.”
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“He operated on us like a surgeon with a scalpel with enormous skill,” Kissinger remembered years later.
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A member of Hanoi's delegation described Kissinger as defeated: he “no longer had the appearance of a university professor making long speeches and continually joking, but a man speaking sparingly, seemingly embarrassed and thoughtful.”
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Le Duc Tho baited Kissinger over and over again with references to a particularly sensitive topic: the rise of domestic dissent in the United States and public opposition to the war. Kissinger tried to say that that subject was off the table, tersely informing the North Vietnamese that he wouldn't discuss domestic politics. But Le Duc Tho kept pressing the point, bringing up Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers as “evidence of the U.S. process of intervention and aggression” and as an example of how Kissinger was being undercut at home.

“Sadness was apparent on his face,” Le Duc Tho later said. “We did not know what he was thinking at that moment, but later he repeatedly wrote that the division of mind in America caused him great pains.”
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Kissinger quickly regained his rakishness. “We bombed them,” he told a number of confidants in private shortly after this meeting, “into letting us accept their terms.” It was a remark as callous as it was true.
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The only thing left was to spin Le Duc Tho's terms so they didn't hurt Nixon's commanding lead in the polls. “My old friend Henry Kissinger held a press conference the other day explaining his diplomatic triumphs,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal in October 1972, following the announcement that an agreement with Hanoi had been reached. Schlesinger continued: “He was, as usual, subtle, disarming and disingenuous. What is most obvious is the spectacular and unprecedented concessions we have made. But the press, following Henry, has written about it all as if we had made no concessions at all. What is saddest of all is that if Nixonger (as Isaiah Berlin would say) had been willing to make these concessions in 1969, we could have had the settlement then; and 20,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese, now dead, would be alive.”
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In November, Nixon got his landslide, having managed to win reelection as both a war president and a peace candidate.
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The Southeast Asia piece of the “southern strategy,” though it did nothing to move Hanoi, was a success at home. The price of victory, however, was high, and included, as the historian Ken Hughes writes, the lives lost in “the four years it took Nixon to create the illusion of ‘peace with honor' and conceal the reality of defeat with deceit.”
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Later, after Nixon's second inauguration, congressional aides asked William Sullivan, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, under what constitutional provision could the White House justify its bombing of Cambodia, which by that point had been going on for four years. Sullivan struggled for a response, finally answering: “For now, I'd just say the justification [was] the reelection of President Nixon.” “By that theory,” the
Washington Post
remarked, “he could level Boston.”
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The Paris Peace Accords—signed in January 1973—could not hold. Saigon would not allow honest elections and Hanoi, which had been fighting for the independence of
all
Vietnam since the 1940s, would not accept a divided country. The question is, were Nixon and Kissinger hoping for a “decent interval” to pass before Saigon fell, by which time Vietnam might be forgotten as what Kissinger called a “backwater”? Or were they planning to use an inevitable violation of the agreement by Hanoi to legitimate a resumption of the bombing?