Why Do So Many Praise Henry Kissinger?

A man responsible for the slaughter of millions is lauded, not condemned

When I was a young man, I lost my mind. At least temporarily.

It was January 20, 1973. I had traveled from Cambridge down to Washington, D.C. to protest the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. About 100,000 people came for days of activities, including hearing Leonard Bernstein conduct Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at the Washington Cathedral for what we called an “Inauguration of Conscience.”

I split off from the main crowd at the Lincoln Memorial to join the estimated 300,000 Nixon supporters that lined the parade route. I squeezed into the front of the crowd somewhere around the Willard Hotel. When the limousine carrying Nixon passed by, I just lost it.

I don’t remember much except leaping up and down, screaming “war criminal” and “murderer.” People on either side of me edged away. I was in a blind rage at Nixon’s brutal expansion of the war from Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia and the strategy of carpet bombing that he promised would bring these nations to their knees.

The car passed. I slowly calmed down. I walked away to find my friends and start the ride home. But the anger never left me. It was aimed not just at Nixon and Melvin Laird, his secretary of defense, but at the chief architect of the war strategy, then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

Anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., January 1973

Kissinger was uniquely culpable. He not only helped kill the peace talks in 1968 that would have stopped the war, promoted a “secret plan” to end the war that actually extended it and broadened it, but he was the major advocate for the carpet bombing that killed hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and radicalized a Cambodian resistance, leading directly to the murderous Pol Pot regime that killed a million more.

And this is just one of his crimes. As others have documented during Kissinger’s life and in the week since he died, Kissinger is directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Argentina, Chile and many other countries. He swung U.S. power behind dictators around the world, explicitly endorsing their brutal military campaigns against domestic opponents in the name of preserving American global dominance.

Yet, he was admired, praised and courted during his life and upon his death. How can this be?

David Corn puzzled over this in his interview on the Joy Reid show on MSNBC last week. “The best explanation I could come up with is that the establishment protects its own,” he wrote afterwards. “Once in the club, always in the club.” It certainly helped that Kissinger was genuinely intelligent, scholarly, witty and successful.

But many intelligent, witty and successful people fall from power. Kissinger never did. The answer may be as simple as the basic motivations that dominate Washington and the upper reaches of American society. People on the rise want to be near those with power, money and prestige. Kissinger offered all that — with the veneer of Harvard scholarship. It is irresistible to those who are, as Shakespeare put it, “seeking the bubble reputation.”

It is actually very similar to why so many people put aside personal misgiving to court Donald Trump today. He, too, offers access to power, money and prestige — just without the intelligence, charm and wit.

I suffered from this myself. When former Secretary of State George Shultz convinced Kissinger to join him, former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry in a sweeping vision of “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” published in The Wall Street Journal in January 2007, I was willing to put aside my anger and criticism of Kissinger’s war crimes to use his prestige to advance a breakthrough in nuclear policy. I was happy to spend the next few years promoting their views. It was very powerful to be able to say that four men who had helped build the American nuclear arsenal now concluded that it should be eliminated. Kissinger, the most hardline of the group, gave it the most credibility. Nowhere in my writings or speeches did I note that he was a war criminal with the blood of millions on his hands.

It was simply too useful to leverage Kissinger’s prestige for validation.

We should be clear: While Kissinger enjoyed several major policy successes, including detente with China and the Soviet Union, most of these could have been accomplished by others. Most of his policies failed — at tremendous cost. They brought ruin to millions. They didn’t solve the problems they were supposed to address. The threats they were designed to counter were often exaggerated, making the brutal policies he advocated unnecessary and counter-productive.

They often succeeded politically, however, helping him and those he served not just rise but prosper. The dead were buried in graves far from America. They became, as Corn points out, just statistics. The policies fooled some the people, most of the time. Those so fooled were usually the people that mattered.

It wasn’t Vietnam, for example, that brought down Nixon, it was Watergate. When Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford kept Kissinger as secretary of state. Kissinger gave Ford credibility.

The brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet, that Kissinger brought to power in a violent September 1973 coup, ruled for twenty years with U.S. support, longer than any other leader of Chile, despite having killed, jailed and tortured tens of thousands of his fellow citizens.

But Kissinger and Pinochet were wrong. Salvadore Allende, the disposed Socialist president of Chile, didn’t represent a threat to the continent. There never was a genuine Soviet threat to Chile or Latin America. The policies Kissinger advocated and Pinochet implemented were completely unnecessary. But the image of strength, security and determination served both men well.

Ten years after protesting at Nixon’s inauguration (and ten years after the Kissinger/Pinochet coup), I was the assistant director of a project on Central America at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Our goal was to create an alternative to the report we expected to be released by the Kissinger Commission on Central America. Out of office, Kissinger was still powerful and respectd.

While we produced seminars, conferences, articles and a book, Central America: Anatomy of Conflict, we couldn’t come close to countering the Kissinger report. Predictably, it subordinated human rights, democracy and self-determination to the geopolitical goal of countering Soviet influence. It opposed, for example conditioning aid to El Salvador to the government’s adherence to human rights lest that “lead to a Marxist-Leninist victory.”

Today, fifty years after protesting at Nixon’s inauguration, I can safely say that nothing I nor anyone else did created an effective counter to Kissinger. We succeeding in helping move America away from the ruthless policies he advocated and which led directly to such later disasters as the invasion of Iraq, but Kissinger’s reputation remained largely unscathed. His greatest success was always his own career.

Lesser mortals were held responsible. Just this Sunday, news broke that the United States has deported a former Chilean official, sending him back to Chile to face trial for kidnapping and murdering a popular folk singer days after the Pinochet coup. “Their death was a slow one,” said the lawyer for the family of the singer and other victims. “There was not a day nor an hour when they were not mistreated, beaten or tortured.”

The Times notes in the story that Kissinger “was the prime architect of covert U.S. plans to destabilize the Allende government.” But Kissinger was never deported, or tried, or punished. Because we didn’t completely discredit Kissinger or his polices we see them repeated today. Benjamin Netanyahu’s carpet bombing of Gaza is a direct descendent of Kissinger’s failed Vietnam strategy.

By focusing on Kissinger’s personal success rather than the consequences of his policies, most of the political and media world remained sweeping in their praise after his death, offering, at most, muted criticism.

David Sanger, writing for The New York Times, was typical, spending most of his long article on Kissinger’s death talking about his charisma, social life and supposed successes with an occasional aside that, “As was the case with Vietnam, history has judged some of his Cold War realism in a harsher light than it was generally portrayed at the time.”

I and many, many others were there at the time, protesting, arguing, countering Kissinger. We judged it then in a very harsh light. This was not “realism” but careerism. He did not promote democracy, he suppressed it. We were right then and right now. The debate, however, was not decided on policy correctness but raw political power. That, Kissinger had in spades.

We were never strong enough to hold him accountable for his many crimes. Let us hope that we do not again see his like. If they do arise, let us work to learn from our mistakes and make sure they never again aggregate so much power and influence.

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BONUS:

Imagine a Military Targeting Bot with the Instincts of Henry Kissinger. “As AI develops, it will take a more significant role in foreign policy and conflict. Will it serve as a moderating force or one that compounds ruthlessness and the tolls wars take? Joe Cirincione joins David Rothkopf and Jon Wolfsthal to discuss how AI has already become a staple of warfare and the numerous ways that it will become even more ubiquitous in the future.”

A new podcast on Deep State Radio. Recorded December 1, 2023.