Worldmaking (68 page)

This interval lasted a little longer than Kissinger had estimated. In March 1975, North Vietnam army regulars crossed the 17th parallel and advanced rapidly on Saigon, encountering token resistance along the way. The ARVN collapsed or melted from view, Saigon fell within a month, and a murderous final reckoning ensued. The abiding image of those harrowing events is an American helicopter perched precariously atop one of the embassy's auxiliary buildings, a ladder dangling below providing last-gasp deliverance for a fortunate few. A little farther down, at ground level, thousands of desperate South Vietnamese citizens besiege the embassy's gates, unable to escape, soon to enter a very different world.

George Kennan was pleased that the United States had terminated a meaningless conflict and shed an unreliable ally. “They won. We lost. It is now their show … our attitude should be: you are heartily welcome to each other; it serves you both right.”
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The callousness of Kennan's appraisal is perhaps mitigated by the fact that his opposition to the Vietnam War was long and consistently disinterested in morality. Kissinger's record is harder to defend. He had inherited a debacle, the escalation of which he supported from afar, and had failed to achieve any of his declared aims beyond a compromised peace agreement and U.S. withdrawal, on terms similar to those Averell Harriman had proposed in 1968. American credibility was already low when the nation took its gloves off and bombed Cambodia and North Vietnam with few restrictions; the world's most powerful nation deploying its heavy bombers against tightly packed cities did not make for edifying viewing. American credibility was almost undetectable in 1975 as Saigon burned.

In an ideational sense, the Vietnam War combined the worst of two worlds. The conflict was made and escalated by liberal Cold Warriors—in the name of ideals that can be traced to Wilson—and was terminated by devotees of realpolitik at a deliberately glacial pace for reasons of credibility. Like the Civil War, Vietnam would cast a pall over American society, and its foreign policy, for decades. Like the Civil War, its history and meaning are fiercely contested to this day. In recent years, orthodox critics and revisionist defenders of the war have clashed over issues such as whether the war was ever winnable, and whether the United States really lost. So Ngo Dinh Diem was a disaster unworthy of American support; Diem was a heroic leader whom the United States fecklessly destroyed. South Vietnam lacked the wherewithal to stand alone; South Vietnam was pro-Western, growing in strength, and badly betrayed. LBJ's bombing campaign was brutal; LBJ's bombing campaign was timid. The United States losing the Vietnam War was inevitable; America would have won had its political leaders shown greater fortitude. So go the lessons of history—or not.

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Kissinger followed his hero Metternich in focusing most of his energy on great power politics. The affairs of smaller nations did not arouse his interest—unless, of course, their patrons were using them as part of a larger game. In language redolent of George Kennan, Kissinger in June 1969 upbraided Chile's foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, for having the temerity to critique U.S. economic policy toward Latin America. Kissinger told him, “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You are wasting your time.” With some justification, Valdés replied, “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.” Kissinger agreed, before adding in the style of a sarcastic teenager, “And I don't care.” An infuriated Valdés replied, “You are a German Wagnerian. You are a very arrogant man.”
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As it happened, Kissinger cared more about the “South” than he realized. Chile was a case in point. Kissinger once dismissed the 2,700-mile-long, 200-mile-wide nation as a “dagger pointed to the heart of Antarctica.”
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Yet on September 4, 1970, when the socialist Salvador Allende won Chile's presidential election by a narrow margin, Kissinger stirred into action, visualizing only the worst-case scenarios. He saw, “Allende's election [as] a challenge to our national interest … [Chile] would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union.”
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Kissinger chaired the Forty Committee, which oversaw the covert operations executed by America's intelligence agencies. He informed the committee, tongue in cheek, “I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” Nixon and Kissinger instructed the CIA to foment instability in Chile to prevent Allende taking power in October. The Agency's point man in Chile, Henry Hecksher, duly obliged, assisting a simple scheme to assassinate the commander in chief of Chile's armed forces, René Schneider, and pinning the blame on the left. Schneider was duly murdered, but few Chileans swallowed the line that Allende's supporters were responsible—foul play was immediately suspected.
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Alternative plans would have to be made.

On September 15, 1970, Nixon had ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” inviting its agents to try anything “your imagination can conjure.”
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So the CIA disbursed funding to opposition political groups, newspapers, and agitators for hire, and generally embarked upon a pervasive campaign of disinformation. Yet none of these ploys achieved the desired results, primarily because Allende was not the protocommunist hobgoblin of Nixon and Kissinger's imagining. Land reform proceeded cautiously and compensation was efficiently arranged for private landowners. The constitution remained sacrosanct and civil liberties continued to be protected—at least when the CIA was not conspiring to violate them.
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It took three full years for the CIA's destabilization campaign to produce a tipping point. The Chilean military overthrew Allende on September 11, 1973, and soon after he was found dead—he had either committed suicide, or had been murdered, with an AK-47 assault rifle.

While Kissinger did not accept full responsibility for this bloody denouement, he did concede that “we helped them” and was personally delighted with the outcome: the rise to power of Augusto Pinochet's repressive pro-Western military junta.
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Historians estimate that the first, and most brutal, stage of Pinochet's reign of terror resulted in nearly two thousand summary executions, tens of thousands of instances of torture, and upwards of eighty-two thousand politically motivated imprisonments.
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Kissinger—who had been promoted to secretary of state by that time, becoming the first man to concurrently head the State Department and serve as national security adviser—informed his colleagues that “however unpleasant [they] act, the [new] government is better for us than Allende was.” Indeed, Kissinger poked fun at America's spineless diplomatic elite during his first meeting with Chile's new foreign minister: “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”
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Depending on taste, there are two ways to interpret the 1973 Chilean coup. It was either a big win for U.S. foreign policy in that a new Castro-type regime had been killed during its infancy, or an egregious example of a superpower blundering into a sovereign nation, hypocritically trampling its democratic will, and installing a regime capable of demonstrable evil. Although the administration was following a precedent set by the Eisenhower administration in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, one might have hoped for better from Kissinger, who claimed to understand that U.S. diplomacy required a more sober sense of what was vital and what was not.

Kissinger's response to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War displayed similarly skewed threat perception, and possibly looked worse to neutral observers of events. Pakistan and India had been at loggerheads for years because East Pakistan sought independence from West Pakistan—East and West were separate territories, some eight hundred miles apart, with quite different identities—and Lahore refused to grant it. In the election of 1970, the prosecession Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats in East Pakistan. In response, in March 1971, the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, dispatched 40,000 troops to quell “disorder” and bring the region to heel. Within two months, 2.8 million residents of East Pakistan had fled across the border into India, creating a vast refugee crisis with which India—a painfully poor country—was ill equipped to cope. The Pakistani military crackdown on the breakaway region had been brutal, and its army committed widespread atrocities, including the targeted rape of Bengali women on a mass scale.
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On December 3, Pakistani troops crossed into India, sparking war, a decision that turned out to be as foolish as it was rash. It took India only thirteen days to defeat Pakistan. On December 16, Pakistan surrendered and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
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This simple recounting of fact might lead one to conclude that the United States had no horse in this race—that, if anything, India and the emerging Bangladesh were on the side of natural justice. In fact, Kissinger and Nixon instinctively supported Pakistan in its struggle with India. While the CIA could not conclude with certainty which side commenced hostilities, Nixon and Kissinger blamed India—and its prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon detested—for starting the war. The president complained to Kissinger that Indian aggression “makes your heart sick,” particularly given that he had “warned the bitch.” “We have to cut off arms,” Nixon demanded. “When India talked about West Pakistan attacking them, it's like Russia claiming to be attacked by Finland.” The less excitable William Rogers wanted nothing to do with the conflict and argued strongly against cutting off supplies to India. Rogers's well-judged caution provided further impetus for Kissinger to side with his bellicose and emotionally volatile boss. He reported to Nixon that “it's more and more certain it's India attacking and not Pakistan.” In concrete terms, the two men secretly urged China to move troops to the Indian border and dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal. On December 12, Nixon used the hotline to warn the Soviet Union of dark consequences if it became involved directly. Kissinger hailed the move as “a typical Nixon plan. I mean it's bold. You're putting your chips into the pot again. But my view is that if we do nothing, there is a certainty of disaster. This way there is a high possibility of one, but at least we're coming off like men.”
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Credibility—“coming off like men”—was the reason Nixon and Kissinger sided so strongly with Pakistan. As Nixon recalled, Kissinger explained his reasoning to him in even starker language: “We don't really have a choice. We can't allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia's.”
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It is difficult to improve upon William Bundy's sharp assessment of Nixon's and Kissinger's actions, which were profoundly reckless:

The fundamental point is that a naked balance-of-power policy, going beyond recognized and accepted U.S. interests, was (and is) simply not possible under the American system, which compels concern for public opinion, for the separation of powers, and for the role of Congress. In the Indo-Pakistan crisis and war of 1971, the policy pursued by Nixon and Kissinger was not merely contrary to these American principles or misjudged at almost every turn: it was an excellent example of the weakness of any American policy that is based heavily on balance-of-power considerations without proper weight to other factors.
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In supporting Pakistan, come what may, Kissinger believed he was acting in accordance with Metternich's precepts on the balance of power.
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Yet the great Austrian strategist did not have to deal with hotlines, nuclear weapons, and public opinion. And he certainly did not direct the diplomacy of a nation born of an idea—whose foreign policy through infancy, adolescence, and adulthood was driven by idealistic self-regard. And so as the trauma of Vietnam faded slowly, powerful elements of the Democratic and Republican Parties joined forces in labeling Kissinger's worldview a tumor amid healthy tissue. They moved swiftly to purge it from the body politic.

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First came Watergate. In conversation with Kissinger in November 1973, Mao Zedong dismissed the fast-spiraling controversy surrounding the botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in May 1972—and Nixon's increasingly desperate attempts to mask his involvement in the cover-up—as “a fart in the wind.” If only the stakes involved were so infinitesimal. Rather gracelessly during the same conversation, Kissinger had observed to Mao, “For me there is no issue at all because I am not connected with it at all.”
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This was strictly true, although Kissinger's enthusiasm for wiretapping explains a certain jumpiness. Watergate cast a dark shadow over the Nixon administration from then on.

Yet there were large pockets of light in which to work, exemplified by Kissinger's deft handling of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, during which an Arab attack on Israel, spearheaded by Egypt and Syria, was repulsed; Israel was victorious, thanks in no small part to U.S. arms, and then prevented from winning too huge a victory; and the Soviet Union was rendered largely inconsequential. This was one of Kissinger's finest moments, alternating between the antagonists, offering inducements and threatening reprisals. He ensured that the war did not spill over into a larger conflict and, crucially, restrained Israel's desire to press its advantage. He followed this up with some adroit shuttle diplomacy through which he brokered a remarkable rapprochement between Tel Aviv and Cairo. And most of this was achieved as Nixon languished in alcohol-soaked isolation—Kissinger made some crucial decisions without the president's participation. In 1974, however, Watergate became a total eclipse, plunging Kissinger's one-man diplomacy, and Nixon's wounded presidency, into darkness.