Kissinger's Legacy

We must acknowledge the sins of the past to confront the evils of today

I was not going to write this. There are already terrific pieces enumerating the many sins of Henry Kissinger. Ben Rhodes and Tommy Vietor took him apart on their podcast Pod Save the World. Elizabeth Shackleford detailed how “Kissinger’s Hideous Legacy Still Haunts the World” for the Chicago Tribune. Matt Duss discussed “The Bad Things Kissinger Did that You Don’t Even Know About” for The New Republic. David Corn reminds us that “Henry Kissinger Is Still a War Criminal” in Mother Jones. The National Security Archive published a definitive declassified dossier on his illegal actions over decades.

But then I got an invitation yesterday from the Aspen Security Summit quoting Henry Kissinger for a banal comment on how we may be sleepwalking into conflict unaware of how technology has greatly increased the destructive power of our weapons. Dozens have made similar comments. Why quote him? Because they want the validation of his name and reputation. For many, Kissinger is still honored as the great sage of American foreign policy.

He should not be. He is responsible for many of the worst decisions America made over the past 50 years. Having come of age during the Vietnam War, he was the first foreign policy leader that I truly despised.

Kissinger was one of the people I had in mind when I wrote in Newsweek that while we must oppose Putin’s illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine, we must be aware that we have also invaded countries illegally. Kissinger led American efforts to destabilize or outright conquer many other nations.

Why America Must Support Ukraine

Among his many sins, he is greatly responsible for the bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. He was intimately involved in the coup that overthrow the democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende and began the deadly twenty-year rule of General Pinochet.

Yet luminaries flocked to his 100th birthday party last week and continue to honor his legacy.

Kissinger’s greatest sins involve Indochina. Kissinger helped sabotage the peace talks between the Johnson Administration and the Vietnamese in 1968 because he didn’t want a peace deal to help Hubert Humphrey defeat Richard Nixon, whom he was then advising. Five years later, Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating essentially the same deal. In between, Kissinger and Nixon engage in massive, indiscriminate bombing campaigns that killed an estimated one million people and helped usher in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia who kill another million people. To understand the scale, the US dropped 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia alone. In all of World War II, the US dropped 160,000 tons on Japan.

Kissinger tried to keep the bombings secret from Congress and the public. As Stanley Karnow documents in his masterful Vietnam: A History, when William Beecher of The New York Times revealed the bombing in May 1969, an outraged Kissinger and Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps on four journalists and members of Kissinger’s own staff. Kissinger promised “We will destroy whoever did this.”

Kissinger personally directed the campaign against Allende. In one of the tapes we have of his conversations (quoted by Rhodes in his podcast) Kissinger says, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to decide for themselves.”

There is much more, including support for ethnic cleansing operations in Pakistan and East Timor. The consequences of his undemocratic policies are still with us. Rhodes says:

The cost of this is delegitimizing America’s support for democracy. We talk about why people in the Global South don’t side with us on Ukraine. This is why. Because they don’t believe the United States when we say things. Because they’ve heard tapes of people like Henry Kissinger saying “Hey, that’s too important for the voters to decide. U.S. foreign policy should decide.”

Despite his disastrous foreign policy (sprinkled with some notable achievements, like the 1972 opening to China), Kissinger became very rich after leaving government. “Kissinger was the first to really show how the celebrity bestowed by government power,” writes Matt Duss, “could be parlayed into a massively profitable post-government career as a paid adviser to powerful multinational corporations and foreign governments.”

His example has been copied nearly universally in the foreign policy community. “Kissinger helped normalize this dynamic of being a consultant to big business and a public policy voice,” wrote Vox’s Jonathan Guyer. It is a very large part of what has crippled independent analysis of U.S. national security strategy in Washington today.

Would all this have happened without Henry Kissinger? Perhaps. But when we look back at Kissinger’s legacy, we must unflinchingly look at all of it. Without acknowledging the sins of our past, we will be unable to effectively confront the similar evil that others do today.