The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens. Verso, 160 pages, $22.00.
From the way that Christopher Hitchens tears into bloated reputations, it'seasy to imagine that in another age he would have spent many a predawn hourhappily preparing to duel. Now he has flung his challenge at Henry Kissinger, aman who generally liked to use the B-52 for predawn confrontations, though hemight also send ground forces and, on special occasions, even an assassin.
Much of the story of Kissinger is already known (not that it's bad to bereminded), so the question that arises apropos of The Trial of HenryKissinger, a book-length version of two articles Hitchens wrote for Harper's last winter, is: Why now? What about this moment leads Hitchens to train his considerable powers of detestation upon Kissinger? Some new facts have come to light in the interim, but the case against Richard Nixon's secretary of state stands much as it did in 1976, when a character in Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold characterized Kissinger "as an odious schlump who made war gladly," a quote with which Hitchens opens his book.
And it's not as if time, celebrity, and innumerable $25,000-a-shot speakingengagements have washed Kissinger clean. On the contrary, being tainted providesthe essential ingredient of his celebrity. As Hitchens notes, to have the likesof Kissinger at your table is to enjoy the guilty pleasure of proximity to "rawand unapologetic power." One of the unacknowledged merits of the InternationalTribunal at The Hague, then, is that it prevents at least some war criminals frombeing reborn as celebrities.
Because of the Hague tribunal--and efforts by Spanish courts to bring ChileanGeneral Augusto Pinochet to trial--Hitchens concludes that the time has come topress charges in earnest against Henry Kissinger. Proceedings against Pinochetand against Slobodan Milosevic show that leaders of governments are no longerimmune to prosecution for crimes against humanity. Hitchens wants the rules thatapply to Chile and Serbia to apply, also, to a superpower. "The United States,"he writes, "believes that it alone pursues and indicts war criminals and'international terrorists'; nothing in its political or journalistic culture yetallows for the thought that it might be honoring and sheltering such a seniorone [as Kissinger]."
Justifiable as Hitchens's challenge to our political and journalistic culturemay be, his book has serious flaws. It is, among other things, force ofpersonality that carries Hitchens into battle with the likes of Kissinger; inthis book, however, the author's personality gets in the way. For example,Hitchens describes the title of Kissinger's memoir Years of Renewal as "unbearably dull and self-regarding." This sort of language in reference to a mere title does nothing but testify to the richness of Hitchens's disdain while it sews doubts about his trustworthiness. Also, the book has no endnotes--a problem in a text meant to make a legal as opposed to a purely polemical argument. In lieu of endnotes, which would have been the proper place for the long block quotations he includes, Hitchens interposes them in the text, againand again interrupting the flow of narrative. Hitchens is usually a prose stylist and a good read. The Trial of Henry Kissinger is a bad read. That does not mean that it makes a bad case; it only suggests that if Hitchens wanted to reach a wider readership with the book than he did with the magazine articles, this may not be the book to do it.
Hitchens brings six charges against Kissinger. They range from "deliberatecollusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh" to "personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living inWashington, D.C." Though crimes directly pertaining to the war in Vietnam arealleged in only the first charge--"the deliberate mass killing of civilianpopulations in Indochina"--that war, in one way or another, set the stage for allother transgressions.
As Hitchens makes plain, the Watergate break-in and the overthrow of the dulyelected government of Salvador Allende in Chile--together with the assassinationof General Rene Schneider, the one Chilean leader who might have prevented thePinochet coup--were of a piece. So was the assassination of Elias P.Demetracopoulos, a critic of the military junta ruling Greece, where Nixon andKissinger had many good friends, including some who could be counted on forfinances in a pinch. As for slaughter in East Timor, that, too, was related toVietnam. The Indonesian leader Suharto, after all, was an ally; to keep himstrong, and safe from contamination by falling-domino disease, Kissinger,personally, had no compunctions about giving him a green light to invade thenewly independent nation of East Timor. Even events in distant Bangladeshorbited around Vietnam, though more remotely. India, striving for neutrality inthe Cold War, refused to rally around the American cause in Indochina. Pakistan,on the other hand, was ruled by just the kind of generals Kissinger liked to seein high places: Ergo, they got a free hand in overturning the election inBangladesh, then known as East Pakistan.
Hitchens shows that besides influencing American policy in the geopoliticalsense, the Vietnam War also altered policy by corrupting the American leadership. The high stakes of escalating war encouraged Kissinger and Nixon tobelieve that there were few laws they were bound to respect in bringing theconflict to their kind of conclusion. What kind of conclusion would that be?Whatever conclusion they chose to effect, the important thing was that at allcosts they must be the ones to effect it. "By any means necessary" was a sloganonce used and abused in certain sections of the antiwar movement. Reading TheTrial of Henry Kissinger establishes, once again, how well the excesses of the peace movement mirrored, in miniature, the mentality of U.S. leaders.
Determined to prosecute the war in Vietnam by any means necessary, Nixon andKissinger applied the same logic to attaining and holding power. Hitchensmaintains that even before Watergate there was an illegal attempt by Republicansto secure the presidency--this one successful (throw in George W. Bush's win in2000 and it's hard not to detect a pattern). In 1968, Hitchens writes, Nixon and"underlings"--chief among them, Henry Kissinger--convinced the South Vietnameseleadership to withdraw from the Paris peace talks, thus weakening the position ofHubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate for president, and contributing toNixon's victory. Nixon and Kissinger promised the Vietnamese a better deal thanthey would have received from the Democrats. In the end, the South Vietnamesegot pretty much the same deal, only many avoidable horrors later.
Hitchens re-creates what he calls the "part-Mafioso and part-banana-republicatmosphere" that prevailed in the White House in the early 1970s, a time whenhideous phrases like "body count" were still in vogue. Bob Kerrey has recentlystated that whatever he and his men did in the village of Thanh Phong in 1969was nothing when compared with the kind of brutality the Viet Cong could inflicton civilians. Perhaps Kerrey should read Hitchens's accounts of the massivebombardments of Laos and Cambodia by B-52s, which "give no warning of approachand are incapable of accuracy or discrimination because of their altitude and themass of their shells." How many Thanh Phong atrocities, how many My Lai massacresfell on Indochina from the skies?
If nothing else, this book rekindles a desire for a full accounting of thewar. Let the trial of Henry Kissinger take place, just as Hitchens demands. Itwould be exquisitely painful to be drawn back into that world of subterfuge anddestruction, but at least the right would find it difficult to go on pretendingthat the war in Vietnam was a glorious lost cause. And the rest of us would bespared surprise when nasty reminders of what the war really was like--such as thestory of Thanh Phong--burst into view. ?
