Kissinger’s Shadow (5 page)

Kissinger contributed to the false idea that Moscow was poised to overtake Washington in the nuclear arms race. Indeed, that it had already done so. “There is no dispute about the missile gap as such,” he wrote in 1961, helping to justify the Pentagon's massive arms buildup that year, including thousands of Minuteman and Polaris missiles. Alarmism was then, as it is today, a good career move: “We must not delude ourselves about the gravity of our position,” he said, for “our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.”
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Such “extravagant claims,” notes a review of Kissinger's scholarship from this period, were reinforced by other hard-liners and in time “became part of the intellectual baggage of the Kennedy Administration, and they explain in part the willingness of the United States to overcommit its power and prestige in Vietnam.”
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Kissinger had hopes for Kennedy. He told Arthur Schlesinger a few months before the 1960 election that what the country needed more than anything was “someone who will bring about a big jump—not just an improvement of existing tendencies, but a shift into a new atmosphere, a new world.” Someone, he said, who will not just “manipulate the status quo” but create a new reality.
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Once in office, JFK disappointed Kissinger, who complained that the new president proved too cautious and too ad hoc in his response to crises.

There was, though, one event that captured his imagination. In August 1962, the White House received intelligence that the Soviets had placed long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading Kennedy, in a speech broadcast to the nation on TV, to announce that he was sending warships to blockade the island. Kissinger was entranced. He called the speech, in an essay published immediately after the crisis had passed in late 1962, a brilliant “stroke”: Kennedy “boldly seized an opportunity given few statesmen: to change the course of events by one dramatic move.” In forcing Khrushchev to back down, the president achieved much more than the dismantling of Soviet missiles: he “exploded the myth that in every situation the Soviets were prepared to run greater risks than we.”
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Again, note the importance of avoiding “inaction,” having less to do with advancing hard interests (the removal of missiles from Cuba) than with proving that “action” was possible.

We now know that the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of the nuclear abyss, was settled not with dramatic televised displays of resolve but with back-channel compromises. No matter. For Kissinger, the lesson to be drawn from the crisis was twofold: first, “initiative creates its own consensus,” and, second, statesmen shouldn't wait until all the facts are in before they seize that initiative.
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“Conjecture,” Kissinger wrote in his tribute to Kennedy, is a preferable foundation for action than data and facts, for an overreliance on information can be paralyzing. “The dilemma of any statesman is that he can never be certain about the probable course of events.” Kissinger continued: “In reaching a decision, he must inevitably act on the basis of an intuition that is inherently unprovable. If he insists on certainty, he runs the danger of becoming a prisoner of events.”

Here, then, in the early winter of 1962, is an almost perfect exposition of what after September 11, 2001, would become known as the “one-percent doctrine,” as expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney declared that if there is even the slightest chance that a threat will be realized, the United States would act as if that threat were a foregone conclusion: “It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence,” he said. “It's about our response.”

“In the decade ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality,” Kissinger wrote in 1963, hoping momentum resulting from Kennedy's bold actions in Cuba could carry over into other areas of foreign policy and build that “new world” he talked about with Schlesinger.
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Kissinger's first visit to South Vietnam was in October 1965, less than a year after Lyndon Baines Johnson decided to escalate the war with ground troops. There, he was briefed by Daniel Ellsberg, then stationed at the US embassy in Saigon. Kissinger took Ellsberg's advice to not waste time talking to top officials but seek out Vietnamese or Americans who had been in the country for a long time. “I was impressed that Kissinger actually acted on my advice,” Ellsberg recalls.
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And what Kissinger learned troubled him deeply: Washington was relying on corrupt, unpopular, and incompetent Saigon allies, North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia made a military solution impossible, and the one pressure tactic the United States did have—the bombing of North Vietnam—would soon “mobilize world opinion against us.”
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Upon his return, Kissinger privately told Cyrus Vance and Averill Harriman, top Johnson officials, that “we couldn't win.”
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But he continued to publically support the war effort. Why? It is impossible, of course, to answer that question definitively, to judge what mix of ambition, considered opinion, and moral judgment moved Kissinger to brush away his doubts and push on. But conceptually at least, he got caught in the vortex of his own circular argument: inaction has to be avoided in order to show that action is possible. The purpose of not questioning the projection of American power in Vietnam was to avoid weakening American purpose.

Upon returning from his first visit to South Vietnam in late 1965, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention. In early December, he joined 189 other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and fifteen other New England universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson's policies would help the “people of South Vietnam … determine their own destiny.”
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“A Vietcong victory will spell disasters,” said the letter. Then, later that month, he led a Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war in a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United States on CBS. Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of North Vietnam, insisting that it was not a violation of international law. He also invoked the analogy of World War II, saying Washington's actions in Indochina were as righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany.
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Bob Shrum, who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger's team and says that when he today watches a recording of the debate he is “amazed by two things: how young we look, even Kissinger, and how wrong we were.”
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Wrong or right, it didn't much matter. For Kissinger it was win-win. If Vietnam had gone well, he could have claimed it as validation of his “little war thesis.” The war didn't, of course, go well, leading Kissinger to confirm his original belief that America lacked the resolve necessary to fight either small or major wars. “I'm absolutely unreconstructed on that subject,” he said in 2011, referring to the United States' defeat in Southeast Asia. “I believe that most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves.”
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Ends and Means

What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one's system, and on the concept one has of one's self and one's relationship to the universe.

—Henry Kissinger

At Harvard as a graduate student, Henry Kissinger and his doctoral adviser, William Yandell Elliott, often took long Sunday walks together in Concord. On one of these outings, Elliott—described by the
Harvard Crimson
as “a large, flamboyant Virginian … a grandiose, hulking figure who often wore a white plantation suit and a Panama hat”—urged his protégé to live his life by Immanuel Kant's famous ethical imperative: “Treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” That dictum was a response to the utilitarian calculus influential during Kant's life that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the interests of the individual. Kant was especially appealing to arch–Cold Warriors like Elliott, who saw Soviet Communism as a vast, monstrous application of instrumental morality.

Kissinger was very familiar with Kant, having grappled, in his 1950 undergraduate thesis, with the paradox that is at the heart of Kantian philosophy: human beings are entirely free
and
history is inevitably advancing according to God's divine plan toward a world of perpetual peace. Kissinger accepted Kant's idea of freedom but, as a child of the Holocaust and an observer of the Gulag, couldn't accept Kant's theology, especially the belief that existence had a transcendent purpose. For Kissinger, the past was nothing but “a series of meaningless incidents.” History had no significance in itself. Whatever “meaning” human beings might assign to past events came not from the working out of a higher, external and objective moral plan, Kissinger argued, but subjectively, from within: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.”
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Kissinger, as a diplomat, is often described as amoral, as believing that values such as universal human rights have no role to play in the implementation of foreign policy. He reportedly once said, paraphrasing Goethe, that if he “had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other,” he would “always choose the latter.”
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This vision, though, isn't amoral. Rather, contrary to Elliott's injunction, it suggests a utilitarian, or relative, moralism: a greater good can be achieved for the greatest number of people when great powers do what they need to do to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system, which, in turn, might nurture whatever fragile justice human beings are capable of achieving.

Kissinger's embrace of a relative, rather than an absolute, morality is suggested in another story from his graduate school days at Harvard. In 1953, during a seminar, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist.
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“Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” the professor said, in reaction to Kissinger's lengthy exposition that argued that there was no such thing as truth. “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.”

Kissinger's response effectively used Kantian existentialism (the idea that human beings are radically free) to undermine Kantian morality. “We can hardly insist,” he said, “on both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.” We can't, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Kissinger admitted that some people might find such a position a “counsel of despair,” since it rejects the possibility of any foundational truth. But, he said, it was actually liberating since it allowed men to escape, however fleetingly, the misery of existence: “Our values are indeed necessary, but not because of an order of nature; rather, they are made necessary by the act of commitment to the metaphysics of a system. This may be the ultimate meaning of personality, of the loneliness of man, and also of his ability to transcend the inevitability of his existence,” Kissinger said.

Then, a bit later in the discussion, Kissinger quoted Kant's moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one's system, and on the concept one has of one's self and one's relationship to the universe.”
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Elliott didn't seem to quite grasp the radical existentialism of Kissinger's position. When you talk about “contingent values,” he responded to Kissinger's comment, you are referring to “that realm of freedom in which man has not learned that there is a plan beyond his own plan which he dimly and imperfectly recognizes that orients him toward God.” Elliott here was holding to a more standard interpretation of Kant, one that accepted the paradox that individuals were both radically free and that there was a divine “plan.” How, he asked Kissinger, could one “reconcile this demonic freedom … with a return to a divine will, through which man, through prayer, submits himself?” Kissinger didn't answer, but a story told by the late journalist David Halberstam suggests that perhaps Kissinger's relativism eventually rankled Elliott. At the professor's retirement party, as colleagues gathered to say goodbye, Elliott “visited each with parting words. Almost all his comments were generous, until he came to Kissinger: ‘Henry,' he began, ‘you're brilliant. But you're arrogant. In fact you're the most arrogant man I've ever met.' Kissinger became ashen-faced. ‘Mark my words,' Elliott continued, ‘your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.'”
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The details of Henry Kissinger's political ascendance, how in a remarkably short period of time he became one of the most powerful men in American history, have been told before. And when they have, it has usually been to highlight their sordidness, to establish the transgression that made Kissinger's rise possible: In late 1968, Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon were locked in a close race for the White House. The war in Vietnam was the critical issue of the election. With both candidates claiming to be the best chance for “peace,” any progress in informal talks then taking place in Paris between Washington and Hanoi would benefit Humphrey. Kissinger, still a Harvard professor, used his contacts in the outgoing Johnson administration, including a former student, to acquire information about the negotiations, which he then passed on to Nixon's campaign. In turn, Nixon's people used the intelligence to preempt a possible truce. Nixon won the election and, in gratitude, gave Kissinger the job of national security adviser.
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