Reprinted with permission from Jacobin Magazine<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>The Good Die Young<\/a>, Jacobin and Verso Books’s<\/i> book-length anti-obituary for Henry Kissinger. It features contributions from Carolyn Eisenberg, Gerald Horne, Bancroft Prize-winner Greg Grandin, and others. Available now from Verso. JONAH WALTERS: Kissinger took his first official government job in 1969, as Richard Nixon\u2019s national security advisor. What kind of administration was he sliding into?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: The war in Vietnam was the most prominent issue at the time. There was a lot of pressure on Nixon \u2013 who claimed to have a secret plan for ending the war, but didn\u2019t want to tell anyone what it was \u2013 to find some kind of resolution on that issue. So he was walking into an administration which was immediately consumed by the war.<\/p>\n It\u2019s relevant to note that Kissinger didn\u2019t have any governing experience at that point. He had consulted for different administrations \u2013 he had even been a consultant for peace talks in Vietnam \u2013 but he had very little idea how the government really functioned. In that one respect, it was similar to the situation with the Trump people in 2016. As far as Kissinger was concerned, the actual practice of government was not a field he paid much attention to.<\/p>\n But despite his inexperience, Kissinger does know enough to do one clever thing: in setting up the National Security office, he is very careful from the outset to maximize his personal power. He sets up reporting relationships designed to force cabinet officers and other people to go through him in order to reach the president. Now, there is some pushback on that, but it\u2019s fair to say that when Kissinger starts out within that administration, he\u2019s already created a kind of structure which would enable him to influence policy to a degree disproportionate to his official role. From the outset he had a very high level of control.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: How did he manage that? He was just a meddling Ivy Leaguer, surrounded by generals and career politicians.<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: With Nixon\u2019s consent he set up reporting relationships that enabled him to monitor Cabinet officials and others. As for Vietnam, when Kissinger came in, he created a comprehensive survey about Vietnam, which went out to all these different government bureaucracies. Daniel Ellsberg<\/a>, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers<\/a>, was a consultant on that. Using that survey, Kissinger was able to zero in on disagreements between various government agencies and personalities, and really exploit them \u2013 not only to create tension among his rivals, but to present himself to Nixon as the only person in the administration capable of managing the massive wartime bureaucracies.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: Did Kissinger even have a strategy for winning in Vietnam?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: In the beginning, he really just deferred to the military. There was a strong feeling in the military that the North Vietnamese\u00a0and the National Liberation Front (NLF) had taken a huge beating during the Tet Offensive<\/a> the year before. They were exaggerating that to some degree, but it was certainly their perception that the guerrilla networks had been rounded up and a lot of fighters had died. Remember that the military still thought they could win this thing. At MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam], many believed with more resources and greater freedom of action they could end the war with a US victory. That was coming from high-ranking military officers.<\/p>\n The most obvious example of this is the bombing of Cambodia<\/a>. People often chalk that decision up to the personal peculiarities of Nixon and his sidekick. There is a strongly argued \u201cmadman theory<\/a>\u201d that says they wanted to show the enemy they could be tough and unpredictable and to convey that message they did crazy things like bombing Cambodia unilaterally. But the military had been advocating bombing and invading Cambodia for years<\/em>. During the Johnson administration, they had been held back by Robert McNamara<\/a>. But by the time Nixon came in, the military had a free reign and more influence in the White House.<\/p>\n This calls attention to the institutional underpinnings of the president\u2019s decisions, which sometimes people ignore by attributing everything to the personalities of Nixon or Kissinger. In a lot of ways, especially at the beginning, Nixon and Kissinger took their marching orders from the military.<\/p>\n This kind of military thinking can be very powerful. You can still see this dynamic at work today, in the War on Terror \u2013 whether it\u2019s in Afghanistan or in Iraq or elsewhere, the military can exercise a huge amount of influence simply by saying, \u2018we can win if we just do this<\/em>, or we\u2019ll end the war if we just do that<\/em>.\u2019 I think on the Left there\u2019s a tendency not to take seriously the influence of the military in shaping foreign policy. But it\u2019s there. Sometimes the commander-in-chief serves at the pleasure of his generals, not the other way around.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: But what interests was the military defending? Was it just a sort of institutional inertia, keeping the war going?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: I don\u2019t know if I would say it was institutional inertia\u2026 but obviously there had already been a massive effort by the military to win the war. You already had 30,000 Americans who died there, you had huge numbers of people coming back with injuries. There were half a million Americans in Vietnam at the point that Nixon takes office. So, yes, if you\u2019re a general, this is what you do \u2013 this is what your business is, to wage war and of course buy expensive weapons systems. There\u2019s always going to be a disposition in that direction, especially when you\u2019ve been fighting the war for four years and so far the situation is inconclusive.<\/p>\n Maybe Kissinger and Nixon rethought things later, because eventually they started hating the military and blaming them for failures, but at first they were quite happy to accept that guidance. Then, by the time they can even catch their breath, 10,000 more Americans were killed in 1969, their first year in office. So as Nixon and Kissinger move into 1970, they already have to take responsibility for a huge proportion of the casualties that have occurred. And that\u2019s significant.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: Take responsibility how? Neither Nixon nor Kissinger ever seemed especially concerned about loss of life.<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: Well, we\u2019re missing a whole side of the picture here: the role of the peace movement<\/a>. On one side of it, you have a very influential military proselytizing to the president about what should be done in Vietnam. But on the other side, there was a growing, mobilized peace movement. And after Tet, suddenly this peace movement gains more credibility with the public at large, which has all kinds of political ramifications in Washington.<\/p>\n It certainly had a big impact on secretary of defense Melvin Laird. If you were in the peace movement in 1969, he could seem like the worst person in the world. His face was on the\u00a0signs, his name was in the chants. And he clearly hated that, if only because it put his old relationships from his time in Congress in jeopardy. In reality, from practically the first minute he came in, Melvin Laird\u2019s primary concern was to get as many Americans out of Vietnam as fast as possible. I suppose you could say that reflects the influence of his family \u2013 his own kids were at peace demonstrations during this time \u2013 but it also shows the tremendous restlessness in Congress, as legislators worried about their own constituents\u2019 anger over the war issue.<\/p>\n Now, Kissinger didn\u2019t want to pull troops out. He didn\u2019t have the same political concerns as Laird or members of Congress. He just wanted to win, and was not overly concerned about the harm this effort would cause. Nixon was caught in the middle. He agreed with Kissinger \u2013 \u2018we have to win this war\u2019 \u2013 but also acquiesced to Laird by saying, \u2018okay, we\u2019re going to start bringing troops home.\u2019 It was a paradox. That\u2019s where \u201cVietnamization\u201d came from \u2013 the idea that US troops would pull out slowly while building up the military in South Vietnam.<\/p>\n In recent years there has been a tendency for scholars to minimize the role of the peace movement. But it was a big part of the reason Nixon listened to Laird and some members of Congress, even though Kissinger didn\u2019t want to. The president was very, very worried about the American public and how people were going to respond. If you were in the peace movement, the whole idea of Vietnamization seemed a total fraud.<\/p>\n It certainly seemed that way to me. We couldn\u2019t stand hearing people say Nixon was ending the war by bringing some troops home. He was expanding the war, bombing and sending troops to Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971. But in fact the steady withdrawal of US troops from the summer of 1969 on was enormously consequential. Because by the time we got to 1973, there were almost no boots on the ground \u2013 which made signing a peace treaty not only feasible but necessary.<\/p>\n The Vietnam War was a great tragedy, a huge waste of human life \u2013 no getting around that. But in reality, it would have been a whole lot worse if there were not a mobilized citizenry<\/a> in the United States. The peace movement created a situation in which the Nixon Administration was forced to end the war. It should be added as well, that the extraordinary discipline and dedication of enemy forces made its continuation extraordinarily costly.<\/p>\n A striking experience: When I was working on my book, I did a couple of phone interviews with Melvin Laird. I didn\u2019t tell him much about what we were going to talk about, but he agreed to talk to me. On our first phone call, the very first thing he says is, \u201cDo you know how many American kids I got out of that place?\u201d First sentence!<\/p>\n His outlook illustrates the internal conflict \u2013 that during those years there was a policy being driven by the military, on one hand, and a policy being driven by the peace movement, on the other. And Kissinger\u2019s thinking \u2013 which was certainly not stupid, only cynical \u2013 was to keep the war going long enough to negotiate secretly and get an agreement, if only to ensure that the United States didn\u2019t lose too much ground in Asia.<\/p>\n I want to say one other thing about Kissinger during this period. I mentioned that when he was setting up the NSC he created structures that marginalized other players in the administration. But forget about formal structures for a moment. Another thing that happened is that Kissinger tightened his personal bond with Nixon. Kissinger constantly plotted to weaken and discredit the other relevant people around him and the president. In the course of doing so, he accumulated tremendous personal power.<\/p>\n People still talk about Kissinger as this traditional cold warrior \u2013 well, he was until he wasn\u2019t. Truthfully, Nixon had more of a vision than Kissinger did. The fact is that Kissinger was simply able to worm his way around all of these other people in the administration because he was willing to indulge\u00a0those qualities of Nixon that others were not, including his grandiosity, jealousy and rage. He could make himself useful to Nixon in a way that other people couldn\u2019t, because they had institutions they represented. Kissinger didn\u2019t represent anything except himself \u2013 and maybe the Harvard clique of pro-war intellectual elites that, even then, was shrinking and fragmenting under the pressure of the war.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: But he must have had some motivation of his own, right? What about his allegiances outside of government?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: On that item, my views have changed after reading the documents. During that period, I was a graduate student at Columbia, and I can remember a ton of conversations about Kissinger. Among peace activists, we were quick to point out how Kissinger was tight with the Rockefellers; \u2018he\u2019s a pawn,\u2019 \u2018they hired him to do their dirty work,\u2019 et cetera. Obviously, that was exaggerated.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that Kissinger was, in some ways, a political face of the cohort of upper-crust East Coasters \u2013 including the Rockefellers \u2013 who orbited Harvard and Wall Street and Washington. But that group was hardly a unified political entity with a consistent program. And the Vietnam War, as it went on, threw that group into confusion.<\/p>\n This more complex relationship can be seen in the transcripts of Kissinger\u2019s telephone calls and talks to business groups. In at least one conversation with David Rockefeller (I think it was after Cambodia), Rockefeller keeps saying, \u201cHenry, this is bad.\u201d But Kissinger keeps telling him, in effect, \u201cThis is going to work out fine; Nixon knows what he\u2019s doing.\u201d Remember, for people like the Rockefellers, who were very tied into elite colleges and universities, there was a lot of restlessness. They couldn\u2019t go to a Yale graduation without it getting disrupted.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one very dramatic moment I wrote about in my book \u2013 just a little story, but to me it\u2019s very symbolic. One of the students who was killed at Kent State<\/a> was from Long Island. He was shot during the first week of May. The funeral\u00a0was a Friday, and that Sunday was Mother\u2019s Day. And, interestingly, who spends Mother\u2019s Day with the boy\u2019s mother? Nelson Rockefeller. His condition of going there was that there would be no publicity at all \u2013 he just went and spent the day with her.<\/p>\n During this time, Rockefeller was talking to Kissinger every day, but he never told Kissinger that he went to visit that household. Then, the next day, on the Monday after Mother\u2019s Day, Nelson Rockefeller spoke out against the war. He later backpedaled a thousand times, of course, but it just highlights the ambivalence of the business community, or at least a certain wing of it. At some point, the alienation of young people became so intense that it became a factor for the economic elite, as well. When Kissinger gave occasional talks to business groups, he was selling the war to them, they weren\u2019t selling the war to him.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: So, the civilian leadership of the Defense Department wants its soldiers out, the business community is vacillating, the anti-war movement is scaring the hell out of the president\u2026 What\u2019s the final straw for Nixon and Kissinger? What finally breaks the war effort?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: A critical moment in this process is the spring of 1971. That\u2019s when thousands of South Vietnamese troops were sent into Laos in a campaign called Lam Son 719<\/a>. They were supposed to get to the crossroads town of Tchepone, stay there for two months, and kill enough people and disrupt enough supply routes that there could not be an offensive in 1972, because that was when Nixon would be up for reelection. Now, American ground troops can\u2019t enter Laos, because of a congressional restriction \u2013 all they can do is escort South Vietnamese troops to the border \u2013 but the Americans use a tremendous amount of airpower and artillery to back up the campaign.<\/p>\n Nixon and Kissinger saw this as their last chance to end the\u00a0war on their terms. But the whole thing was a total failure, to the absolute mortification of Nixon and Kissinger.<\/p>\n Casualties were so heavy that the government of South Vietnam pulled its troops out after just a few weeks. Soldiers on the ground were so desperate to leave that some of them clung to American helicopters as they flew off \u2013 it was chaos; South Vietnamese soldiers trying to flee Laos. The television cameras picked up on this, of course \u2013 showing pictures of those troops retreating back into South Vietnam. It was a nightmare for the White House, especially since they\u2019d been pushing this whole Vietnamization thing as their exit plan.<\/p>\n Remember, this was 1971. It was a very dramatic time, on all sides. The veterans\u2019 protests in the United States were becoming larger and more visible. John Kerry testified<\/a> in Congress before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Vets were up on Capitol Hill throwing away their medals. It was the worst moment for the White House since Nixon took office.<\/p>\n This debacle was at a turning point, and ultimately lead to Nixon and Kissinger accepting a relatively unfavorable peace agreement in 1973. But the South Vietnamese failure to hold Tchepone<\/a> \u2013 which showed Vietnamization to be a joke, and all but guaranteed there\u2019d be a major North Vietnamese offensive in 1972 \u2013 also shaped the White House\u2019s diplomacy with China in very profound ways.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: Nixon is famous for being the first president to visit the People\u2019s Republic of China in 1972. And he traveled with his sidekick in tow. It\u2019s one of the weirder episodes in twentieth-century diplomatic history \u2013 Kissinger and Mao reportedly drank whiskey together, while Kissinger and Zhou Enlai<\/a> discussed continental philosophy in the evenings. (Or so it was said.) How did that visit come about?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: There had been a lot of discussion during the Johnson years, including by Nixon himself, about the need to change the White House\u2019s relationship with the People\u2019s Republic of\u00a0China. It had become absurd that the United States was pretending it didn\u2019t exist. So from the time that Nixon took office, some members of his administration had put out feelers to the Chinese about an opening. But then the United States invaded Cambodia. Things froze, and Nixon\u2019s overture to China, which had looked like it was going to bear fruit, suddenly failed.<\/p>\n Then, in 1971, the American ping-pong team<\/a> was invited to China, and their visit went well. Soon after, Mao sent a message making it clear that China was prepared to welcome an American emissary. Nixon and Kissinger were ecstatic; it was like receiving a coveted invitation to the senior prom. Kissinger saw right away that this could be fantastic for Nixon \u2013 he would go visit China, it would make a splash in the media, it would resurrect the administration\u2019s public image. As Kissinger said to Nixon more than once, \u201cThis will take Vietnam off the front pages.\u201d<\/p>\n The second advantage, which both Nixon and Kissinger see right away, is that an opening with China will put pressure on the Soviet Union to be more forthcoming on a variety of issues. The president really wanted a summit in Moscow, especially before the reelection campaign. Kissinger and Nixon thought the China opening and possible presidential trip to Beijing might compel the Russians to accept a summit. And they also thought, if things went really<\/em> well, maybe China could help them get an acceptable peace treaty with Hanoi. This was the beginning of an idea that would get bigger and bigger until January 1973, when the peace agreement with Hanoi was finally signed: how can the Chinese help with this?<\/em><\/p>\n But in July of 1971, when he and Zhou had their first meeting, Kissinger\u2019s main concern was marginalizing the State Department. Not just Rogers, but the whole State Department. He didn\u2019t want them to know what he was saying. There was a very high premium on secrecy. Kissinger even developed the habit of only using a Chinese translator. He thought secrecy was indispensable, even between government offices. The American \u201cbureaucracy\u201d would only interfere with his \u201cgreat power diplomacy\u201d \u2013 that was his philosophy. In a prefiguration of Donald Trump, he told Zhou Enlai that his problem with the \u201cbureaucracy\u201d was similar to the problem the Chinese government faced.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: You mentioned that the Lam Son debacle impacted the administration\u2019s dealings with China. Can you elaborate?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: Throughout his time in office, Nixon\u2019s need for something positive to happen in Vietnam shaped his diplomacy with the Chinese. At first, he just needed distractions. That meant visits to China, television crews at the Great Wall, et cetera \u2013 Nixon and Kissinger got fantastic mileage out of spectacles like these. But as time went on and the situation became more desperate, they tried to get China \u2013 and the USSR, to an even greater extent \u2013 to help them pressure Hanoi to accept their terms for ending the war.<\/p>\n Kissinger led this effort, making promises to China that he kept from the State Department. The way he behaved in these negotiations was actually pretty shocking. If the American public back then could have seen some of these transcripts<\/a>, they would have been amazed. They\u2019re just so absurd.<\/p>\n This was Kissinger\u2019s importance: he had no principles whatsoever. If American kids are dying, it didn\u2019t make any difference to him. If POW wives are in anguish because they want their husbands released, he didn\u2019t care. If thousands of people get killed in Pakistan, it wasn\u2019t going to bother him, as long as it brought him closer to some abstract diplomatic goal with the Chinese. Other people in the government actually get bothered by these things. But as for Kissinger, he was just the implementer. There doesn\u2019t seem to ever be a single human situation in all of the Vietnam-related transcripts to suggest that he had qualms about people dying or suffering.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: Ultimately, though, Kissinger ended up taking some flak for this, right? His opponents in the GOP were able to outflank him on the right, calling him untrustworthy because of his relative friendliness with the Chinese and what they viewed as his \u201cappeasement\u201d of the Soviets.<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: Well, what Kissinger did with the Soviets was to intervene in the arms control negotiations. Behind the scenes, he essentially took them over. There was an official delegation in Helsinki doing this work, and Kissinger didn\u2019t bother to tell them he had a parallel negotiation going on in Washington.<\/p>\n To people like Ronald Reagan, who became one of Kissinger\u2019s biggest detractors later on, this looked like selling out the United States. To summarize a complex subject: the final arms control deal with Moscow, which Kissinger had largely engineered, put the United States in a somewhat disadvantaged position on offensive nuclear weapons like intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Many experts defended this agreement \u2013 known by the acronym SALT, for strategic arms limitation talks \u2013 saying the particular numbers didn\u2019t matter. But others at the time viewed it as a sell-out. Some of those others \u2013 like Paul Nitze<\/a> \u2013 would later become strong opponents of arms control.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s important to understand how all these diplomatic spectacles with the communist superpowers completely undermined the popular justification for the war in Vietnam. And it wasn\u2019t just China. Nixon spent hours and hours with Brezhnev, too. He even went to Moscow and addressed the Soviet people.<\/p>\n Have you heard of poor little Tanya? There was this little girl, Tanya, in Leningrad during World War II, whose diary ended up in a museum there. In this diary, she recorded how everyone in her family was dying from starvation. Her last entry says something like, \u2018Today my mother died and now only Tanya is left.\u2019 So, in 1972, when Nixon went to the Soviet Union, he visited the museum where the diary was\u00a0kept. On the wall of the museum it said that Tanya had died four months after that final entry. Then, Nixon delivered this incredibly emotional address<\/a> to the Soviet people about all the Tanyas of the world and how we should all work together to prevent the Tanyas of the future from experiencing this cruel fate, and so forth.<\/p>\n But you have to understand that Nixon was making this speech at the same time that the war in South Vietnam and Cambodia was raging out of control, with American B-52s and fighter-bombers striking these places, as well as North Vietnam. So, on the home front, there was a kind of dissociation taking place. The American public was conditioned to think of Vietnam as a war to stop the Soviets from taking over the world. Meanwhile, it seemed like the president was getting along with the USSR just fine. So the question became, \u2018Why are you still killing American kids in Vietnam?\u2019 \u2018And what about our Tanyas?\u2019 the North Vietnamese negotiators inquire. It was very sobering.<\/p>\n JONAH WALTERS: I have one more question for you, Carolyn. You hear a lot of people, on the right and on the left, say that we\u2019re living in the world Kissinger built \u2013 that Kissinger ushered in a new paradigm in American foreign policy. What do you think of that?<\/p>\n CAROLYN EISENBERG: I don\u2019t entirely agree. Kissinger would have certainly made that claim. But when you read his books, there is a tremendous amount of pretentiousness \u2013 a habit of dressing up unoriginal ideas to sound like a new conceptual framework.<\/p>\n But I do think that Kissinger\u2019s disposition to favor military force had effects that continue to reverberate. We see this in many situations, including his absolutely terrible advice to George W. Bush about Iraq, many years later. There was always a militaristic edge to him, but crucially that militarism was always directed at lesser powers \u2013 small, relatively weak countries. I guess that did set a tone for what came after. But that\u2019s hardly a new paradigm.<\/p>\n This is what we should be really concerned about: somehow, amid this whole mess of swirling interests and priorities, with a hot war in Vietnam and a Cold War everywhere else and an anti-war movement at home, the US government solidified its identity as a national security state. I don\u2019t know if we can really call that a transformation<\/em> \u2013 probably not \u2013 but it was a kind of hardening of a pre-existing condition. A national security state involves an obsession with threats, a mistrust of the public, a strengthening of the executive \u2013 all things that should be intensely familiar to us today.<\/p>\n One of the dangers of a national security state is that it ultimately empowers people like Nixon and Kissinger \u2013 who may be lacking any kind of moral compass \u2013 to make hugely consequential decisions, almost unilaterally, even when there is no democratic mandate. The two were embedded in a whole network of national security institutions. Yes, there were people at the lower levels \u2013 Daniel Ellsberg is an example \u2013 who opposed the president, who went home to their families every night anguished by what was happening, and some of them quit. But for the most part, government officials behaved as \u201cenablers,\u201d rendering Nixon and Kissinger almost untouchable.<\/p>\n
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\nThat becomes quite important as he goes through those four years \u2013 not only that he\u2019s inexperienced, but also that he doesn\u2019t particularly care very much about normal procedures, which made him extremely useful to Richard Nixon. For Kissinger, there was no sense of the way things had been done in the past, that there were precedents you had to be guided by. These kinds of things were highly relevant to Secretary of State William P. Rogers<\/a>, to Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird<\/a> \u2013 they were even relevant to the CIA director, Richard Helms \u2013 but they were not relevant to Kissinger. There were no norms that governed Henry Kissinger\u2019s behavior in the Nixon administration.<\/p>\n