GREG GRANDIN is the author ofThe Empire of Necessity , which won the Bancroft Prize;Fordlandia , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; as well asEmpire's Workshop andThe Blood of Guatemala . A professor of history at New York University and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library, Grandin has served on the UN Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for theLos Angeles Times ,The Nation ,New Statesman , andThe New York Times . You can sign up for email updateshere .
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ALSO BYGREG GRANDIN
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War
The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
PRELUDE:Â Â On Not Seeing the Monster
INTRODUCTION: Â Â An Obituary Foretold
 1.  A Cosmic Beat
 2.  Ends and Means
 3.  Kissinger Smiled
 4.  Nixon Style
 5.  Anti-Kissinger
 6.  The Opposite of Unity
 7.  Secrecy and Spectacle
 8.  Inconceivable
 9.  Cause and Effect
10.  Onward to the Gulf
11.  Darkness into Light
EPILOGUE: Â Â Kissingerism without Kissinger
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by Greg Grandin
Copyright
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KISSINGER'S SHADOW . Copyright © 2015 by Greg Grandin. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-449-7
e-ISBN 978-1-62779-450-3
First Edition: November 2015
* Kissinger wrote his thesis long before the United States fully committed to Vietnam, but over the years he'd return again and again to many of its premises to explain why that war, along with others that followed, went wrong. His most recent book,World Order , cites T. S. Eliot's “Choruses from the Rock”: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
* Fifty years later, George W. Bush's undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, an important player in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, proposed that Washington should respond to 9/11 by attacking South America, along with “other targets outside the Middle East in the initial offensive,” in order to “surprise the terrorists.” (Feith's memo is discussed in the 9/11 Commission report and reported on inNewsweek, August 8, 2004.)
* Letters exchanged between Henry Kissinger and Hannah Arendt regarding a submission capture something essential about the two correspondents. Kissinger (on August 10, 1953) alternates between obsequiousness, condescension, and pedantry: “I hope you will not feel that I have done violence to any of your intentions in some of my editorial changes. Your article is one of the most substantial ones we have printed since we have startedConfluence and I have worked on it with the greatest sympathy spending a whole weekend going over it several times. I did make a few cuts not because it was too long but because it seemed to me to ramble. I am convinced that the essence of a good article is also to keep some proportion between what one must say to support one's argument and what might be excellent in itself but what detracts from the main force of the argument.” Arendt's response (August 14, 1953) dispensed with courtesies: “I fear you will be disappointed to see from the galleys all sentences which you wrote were eliminated and quite a few of my own sentences re-instated.⦠I realize that your editorial methodsâre-writing to the point of writing your own sentencesâare quite current.⦠I happen to object to them on personal grounds and as a matter of principle. If we had given this matter a little more thought, you might have decided not to want this, or any of my manuscripts, which I would have regretted. But it certainly would have saved us both some time and trouble.” The rest of the correspondence, found in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, suggest that Kissinger published the manuscript as per Arendt's wishes.
* “When technique becomes exalted over purpose, men become the victims of their complexities. They forget that every great achievement in every field was a vision before it became a reality,” he wrote in 1965 (The Troubled Partnership , p. 251).
* Kissinger directly linked his call for action to his earlier critique of “American empiricism,” arguing that it was only willed actionâaction taken instinctively, with incomplete informationâthat can prevent such empiricism from becoming a rigid dogma. In his first book,Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), pp. 424â26, he wrote: “Policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities. To attempt to conduct it as a science must lead to rigidity. For only the risks are certain; the opportunities are conjectural. One cannot be âsure' about the implications of events until they have happened and when they have occurred it is too late to do anything about them. Empiricism in foreign policy leads to a penchant forad hoc solutions.” Americans might pride themselves on being undogmatic but that they “postpone committing themselves until all facts are in” is itself a form of dogmatism. By the time they do act, “a crisis has usually developed or an opportunity has passed.” The result, Kissinger argued, is an inability to bridge the gap between “grand strategy” and the “particular tactics” taken in response to any given crisis. He goes on: “The paradoxical result is that we, the empiricists, often appear to the world as rigid, unimaginative, and even somewhat cynical, while the dogmatic Bolsheviks exhibit flexibility, daring, and subtlety.” But, he said, “the willingness to act need not derive from theory.” One can and should act based on intangibles: on “tradition,” past experiences, instinct, imagination, and “a feeling for nuance.” To do so will help sharpen our leaders' consciousness regarding those intangibles: “A power can survive only if it is willing to fight for interpretations of justice and its conception of vital interests:” but, importantly, it would be a disaster to wait to act until one has a fully formed interpretation of justice and conception of interests, or until the situation allows for a perfect application of that interpretation and conception. Rather, in a complex world, ideals and interests can only be known by testing them, by acting. Confronting the Soviet threat “presupposes above all a moral act: a willingness to run risks on partial knowledge and for a less than perfect application of one's principles. The insistence on absolutes either in assessing the provocation or in evaluating possible remedies is a prescription for inaction.” Inaction would lead to a dogmatic loss of imagination, and loss of imagination would hinder future action.
* We also now know that Moscow's bid to place nuclear missiles in Cuba was prompted by Washington's involvement in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy's staggering arms escalation. Also key to understanding Cuban motives in wanting the missiles was Operation Mongoose (a covert CIA operation put into place following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion designed to topple the Cuban government), ongoing acts of sabotage carried out by Washington-backed anti-Castro proxies, and the fear of another invasion.
* If Kissinger had the soon-to-be dissident Ellsberg perched on his left shoulder, Edward Lansdale, an unrepentant Cold Warrior, sat on his right. Lansdale, an old Asia hand, also briefed Kissinger on his trips to Vietnam; his experience in the Pacific dated back to World War II and ran through the counterinsurgency in the Philippines and the Korean War. Lansdale was somewhat marginalized by the time Kissinger established regular contact with him in 1965, serving as the assistant to the US ambassador in the Saigon embassy. But earlier, during the covert years of deepening American involvement in South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, Lansdale was one of the key figures who took “black bag” counterterrorism and psychological warfare tactics learned in the Philippines and applied them in Vietnam. Such tactics were later incorporated into Phoenix, the CIA's infamous assassination program. Lansdale sent his South Vietnamese contacts Kissinger's way when they were visiting the United States, so as to “revive your faith in your fellow man in the good fight.” And as it became clear that Johnson wouldn't fully commit to what Kissinger thought was needed to win in South Vietnam, Kissinger commiserated with Lansdale, writing in a June 2, 1967, letter: “You have been much on my mind in the recent months. What a tragic process to have our bureaucracy clash with the aspirations of a shattered society.” Lansdale is a good example of the many-headed-hydra US national security state: between his tours in Vietnam, he was in charge of the program of destabilization against the Cuban government authorized by Kennedy on November 30, 1961, following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which in turn set off the chain of reactions that led to the Cuban missile crisis. Kissinger and Lansdale shared a common mentor, Fritz Kraemer, a refugee from Nazi Germany who tutored a number of influential military and intelligence officers. For Lansdale's connection with Kraemer, see Kraemer's obituary,New York Times , November 19, 2003. For Kissinger's correspondence with Lansdale, see Hoover Institution Archives, Edward G. Lansdale Papers, box 53.
    
