Kissinger’s Shadow (7 page)

In contrast, great statesmen, the ones who will truly make a difference, never let themselves become paralyzed by a “pre-vision of catastrophes.” They are agile, thriving on “perpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.”
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This was a good description of Kissinger in late 1968, nimble and fleet-footed, acting incisively on conjecture and seizing the spirit of the moment. No matter how many contacts he cultivated, no matter how many late nights he spent in Parisian cafes whispering into the ears of young staffers or how many German conversations he had from street-corner pay phones, his defenders probably are right. Even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have had exact information about the decisions being made at the White House. He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guess, playing the angles, sussing out the chance, all the while giving the appearance of composure and certainty. Nixon himself called the information Kissinger passed on “uncomfortably vague.” Though he was impressed by his flair for the covert: “One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.”
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Sailing to Europe shortly after the start of Harvard's fall term, Kissinger might have feared that the trip was time wasted, a fool's errand. And once back, he took an enormous risk. If things had broken a different way, he could have been burned with both political parties or, even worse, brought up on charges. It is illegal for private citizens to interfere in the foreign relations of the United States. “Kissinger had proven his mettle by tipping us,” Richard Allen told Hersh. “It took some balls to give us those tips”; it was a “pretty dangerous thing for him to be screwing around with national security.”

Brushing aside any “pre-visions of catastrophes” he might have had, Kissinger leveraged a high-stakes, dead-heat presidential campaign, using the anxieties of those around him as the raw material of “fresh creation.” Rather than fall “prisoner of events,” as he feared he might during that moment of weakness on the Vineyard, Kissinger busted out. He wasn't so much seizing an opportunity as creating one. After Nixon's victory, Kissinger did what he could to keep Nixon's attention, including starting the false rumor that the outgoing Johnson administration planned to either depose or assassinate the president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, before leaving office. He then arranged, via William F. Buckley, to have the rumor passed on to Nixon. Kissinger said he wanted the incoming president to know that “if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem [an earlier South Vietnam leader who was deposed and executed in a coup that the Kennedy administration helped initiate], the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.” The historian Stephen Ambrose says that what Kissinger was doing was playing to Nixon's keenness for “secrecy, rumor, intrigue, and circuitous communication, all covered by a veneer of concern for high principle (America must stick by its friends) and highlighted by Kissinger's dramatic phraseology.”
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Kissinger wanted a top spot in Nixon's White House, but even in his wildest dreams he couldn't have imagined the reward his risk taking would bring. A victorious Nixon not only made him the head of the National Security Council but instructed him to reorganize that institution so as to take control of foreign policy from the State Department and the Defense Department.

It's worth pausing a moment to consider the above narrative in truncated, chronological form, since it conveys just how fast Kissinger's wheel of fortune was spinning, the quickness with which he went from hopelessness, from believing his career was collapsing along with the middle ground of American politics—from being confused with Professor Schlesinger!—to being anointed Nixon's national security adviser.

Nixon's inauguration was still a month away and Kissinger was already one of the most powerful men on the planet.

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Having now lived a very long life, first acting in the name of the strongest state in world history and then moving into a realm of unparalleled private privilege, Kissinger has enjoyed great luxury, wealth, and public acclaim. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he encouraged in its inception and helped extend in its duration. That he was able to pull off the original gambit that brought such attainment—that, instead of being banished to Harvard or indicted, he became the most powerful national security adviser in American history—proved the validity of his theories, that with imagination certain individuals could grasp the inner movement of history and manipulate it to their advantage.

From this point forward, every single policy that Henry Kissinger advocated as being good, both materially and morally, for the long-run, strategic ends of the United States also happened to be good for the personal advancement of Henry Kissinger.

 

3

Kissinger Smiled

Oh no, we won't stop the bombing. Absolutely not.

—Henry Kissinger

Richard Nixon was inaugurated on January 20, 1969. A month later, on February 24, Henry Kissinger and his military aide, Colonel Alexander Haig, met with Colonel Ray Sitton, to begin the planning of Menu, the code name for the B-52 bombing of Cambodia. Extreme secrecy was required. Nixon, elected promising to end the conflict, feared the public backlash that an escalation of the war into Cambodia might provoke. And the White House wanted to circumvent Congress, which exercised its power over the armed services largely through the appropriations of funds needed to conduct specific missions. Many, including Nixon and Kissinger, felt that Congress wouldn't have approved the bombing of Cambodia, since Cambodia was a neutral country that the United States wasn't at war with.

Kissinger, Haig, and Sitton came up with a simple but comprehensive deception.
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Sitton, based on recommendations he received from General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam, would work up a number of targets in Cambodia to be struck. Then he would bring them to Kissinger and Haig in the White House for approval. Kissinger was very hands-on, revising some of Sitton's work. “I don't know what he was using as his reason for varying them,” Sitton later recalled. “Strike here in this area,” Kissinger would tell him, “or strike here in that area.” Once Kissinger was satisfied with the proposed target, Sitton would backchannel the coordinates to Saigon, and from there a courier would pass them on to the appropriate radar stations, where an officer would make the last minute switch. The B-52 would be diverted from its “cover” target in South Vietnam into Cambodia, where it would drop its bomb load on the real target. When the run was complete, the officer in charge of the deception would burn whatever documents—maps, computer printouts, radar reports, messages, and so on—that might reveal the actual flight. Then he would write up false “post-strike” paperwork, indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was flown as planned. This way, Congress and Pentagon administrators would be provided “phony target coordinates” and other forged data, so as to account for actual expenditures—of fuel, bombs, and spare parts—without ever having to reveal that Cambodia was being bombed.

Sitton, an expert on B-52s who was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did often wonder what he was doing participating in a shadow chain of command, bypassing superiors in the Department of Defense, plotting bombing targets in a vaulted room deep in the bowels of the Pentagon and then secreting them into Kissinger's office for approval. “I kind of felt I was way out on a limb and skating on some pretty thin ice with all my trips to the west basement of the White House.” But whenever he expressed these concerns to higher-ups, he was told: “Whatever you are doing, keep on doing it. It seems to be working. Do just what you are doing. When you get a call to go to the White House, go, because you don't really have any choice.”

That's
how
an illegal, covert war came to be waged on a neutral country, a war run out of a basement by a presidential appointee who a few months earlier was a Harvard professor.

Why
Nixon and Kissinger felt they needed to wage a secret, illegal war on a desperately poor country of rice farmers and water buffalos is another story.

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Richard Nixon wanted a tough line against North Vietnam, believing it would force Hanoi to make the concessions necessary to bring the conflict to a face-saving conclusion. Already, before the November election, Nixon had shared with Bob Haldeman what has come to be known as the “madman theory.” Walking along a Key Biscayne beach, Nixon told his future chief of state that he wanted the North Vietnamese “to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button'—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
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Kissinger was more than willing to oblige. “Toughness,” after all, was a leitmotif that ran through much of his statecraft, the idea that war and diplomacy are inseparable and that, to be effective, diplomats need to be able to punish and persuade in equal, unrestricted measure. In fact, the madman theory was an extension of Kissinger's philosophy of the deed—that power wasn't power unless one was willing to use it, that the purpose of action was to neutralize the inertia of inaction.
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Within days of Nixon's January 20 inauguration, Kissinger asked the Pentagon to tell him what his bombing options were. He and Nixon wanted to start striking North Vietnam again but that would be hard to pull off given domestic support for Johnson's bombing halt. The next best option was to bomb Cambodia. There were two stated reasons why Nixon and Kissinger decided to launch what turned out to be a four-year bombing campaign in that country. First, the peace talks that Nixon, with an assist from Kissinger, had derailed were going to start again, and the White House wanted a show of resolve that would force Hanoi to make the concessions it believed were needed in order to wind down US operations.

The second expressed reason for the bombing was to destroy the supply lines, depots, bases of North Vietnamese forces, and command center of the National Liberation Front (NLF, or the Vietcong, South Vietnam's Communist insurgency), which was supposedly located in Cambodia, near its border with Vietnam. The United States had in fact started targeting Cambodia (and Laos) in 1965, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to accelerate the air assault, especially after the early 1968 Tet Offensive revealed just how effective Hanoi was in running troops and arms into South Vietnam from Cambodia. Johnson, however, having escalated the war in 1965 refused to further escalate it in 1968. By then, he was trying to figure a way out.
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