John Duricka/AP Photo
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, November 28, 1990, during the second day of hearings on the prospects of U.S. military action against Iraq.
One day in the autumn of 1989, a couple of months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, my friend Kelly Candaele and I went to Midtown Manhattan to film an interview with Henry Kissinger. Kelly was an accomplished documentary filmmaker; his film on women’s professional baseball in the 1940s—his mother had been a star—was the basis for the picture A League of Their Own. He was then producing and directing a documentary on the life of Olof Palme, the socialist leader who twice had been Sweden’s prime minister before his assassination in 1986. (I was writing the narration, which, to our astonishment, was read by Paul Newman, who, like Palme, was a graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio.)
Kelly had conducted interviews with Palme’s friends, allies, and key figures in his life, such as former German chancellor Willy Brandt and DSA founder Michael Harrington, and gotten archival footage of many of them, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, extolling Palme’s legacies. He’d also obtained footage of, and conducted interviews with, Palme’s critics, all but one of them Swedish conservatives. Palme’s best-known conservative critics, however, weren’t Swedish. They were Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
In 1968, when he was heir apparent to Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander, Palme had joined a Stockholm demonstration against the Vietnam War. (In the same year, he pointed out, he also had spoken at a larger demonstration against the Soviets’ invasion of Czechoslovakia.) In 1972, then prime minister, he’d led a demonstration protesting Nixon’s Christmastime carpet bombing of Hanoi. Nixon and Kissinger reacted by expelling, albeit temporarily, Sweden’s ambassador to the U.S., and making very clear that Palme was no friend of the United States—at least, of their United States.
But Kissinger had clearly welcomed talking with Palme when they were both out of office, and he agreed to meet with us in his office to talk about Palme—which meant, about foreign policy. As the very nature of the project made clear we were both on the left, and as he, and hardly anyone else, had ever heard of us, we were surprised by his assent. We figured—and still figure—that he thought such an interview might be seen as a token gesture to liberals, who, after all, write most of the histories.
There was nothing remotely liberal, however, in what Kissinger said that day. Palme’s insistence on public policy rooted in basic morality obviously still irked him. “It’s very easy to be moralistic at a great distance in an area where Sweden had no direct interest,” he said. “A Swedish prime minister can afford to be a gadfly. If Palme had been prime minister of a country of 100 million [citizens], possessing nuclear weapons and being a key element of the international structure, he couldn’t have played the role of a gadfly to that extent.”
In his own interview with Kelly, Willy Brandt said that Kissinger had expressed to him his exasperation with Palme, and that Brandt had reminded him that Palme had gone to college in (and then hitchhiked around) America. That only triggered Kissinger’s broader exasperation with American idealism. “Going to an American university,” he told us, “he of course absorbed with relish the American nostalgia that foreign policy has to be conducted entirely on abstract, theoretical, and, maybe, moral and philosophical grounds. And that’s not what a student of history would conclude about how foreign policy has in fact been conducted.”
It’s how Palme conducted his foreign policy, however, which is why he became the first Western European head of government to oppose the Vietnam War, and the first Western head of government to provide assistance to the African National Congress as it sought to overturn South African apartheid—all the while also fiercely opposing the USSR’s occupation and suppression of Eastern Europe. (There is still some suspicion that Palme’s murder, which has never been solved, was the work of apartheid South Africa’s agents.) Palme also propounded the idea that the U.S. and USSR were more endangered by the sheer number of their nuclear weapons than by either attacking the other, and mobilized both U.S. and Soviet diplomats to embrace this perspective, which helped lead to the START treaties that reduced the number of nukes each nation possessed.
Some gadfly.
Kissinger did want us to understand that he admired Palme’s intellect—his “extraordinary culture, extraordinary intelligence, high analytical ability and great knowledge. He was fun to talk to, whether you agreed with him or not.”
For the purposes of Kelly’s film, it was a very good interview. Whatever Kissinger’s purposes may have been, it did nothing to dispel his reputation as the grim reaper of Vietnam, Chile, and Cambodia.
