The Long Shadow of Henry Kissinger, America's Greatest War Criminal
Fear, Loathing and the Domino Theory
It seemed as if he might never die, but Henry Kissinger’s end finally came on November 29th, and in a much less dramatic fashion than he deserved. Not for Henry the K the fiery plane crash, daring assassination or exciting mid-speech heart attack. Instead, his death was boringly, stereotypically geriatric: complications from a fracture sustained in a fall.
I hadn’t thought about Kissinger often in recent years, though I read about his 100th birthday party earlier this year. Apparently his lucrative post-governmental career never stopped: he made his last in-person speech only six weeks earlier, and his last overseas trip—with much fanfare from Xi Jinping—was to China in July. In the forty-six years between his resignation as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, Kissinger had advised every U.S. president, lectured, consulted and written several shelves full of books, as well as been a fixture on social scene in New York and Washington. Dinners, balls, museum and Broadway openings, soirees of every variety—there was nowhere he wasn’t invited. As far as I know, the luminaries Kissinger hobnobbed with kept their negative opinions to themselves—with the notable exception of the late Peter Jennings who, at a party hosted by Barbara Walters, called out, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?” Apparently Kissinger handled this affront in blasé fashion, befitting a man who never knew a moment of regret, let alone shame.
So it was heartening to read in David Sanger’s NYT obituary—the only one Kissinger would have cared about—a detailed account of his illegal, immoral and cruel deeds as National Security advisor and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. The carpet bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (the latter two neutral countries whose connection to the war was geographic, not military); the U.S.-backed genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile; the prolonging of the Vietnam War for five years, during which half the GI’s who died in that war lost their lives. Incredibly, Kissinger won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for “ending” the war on the same terms he had rejected in 1968. There was also the “opening” of China—in retrospect an increasingly negative achievement—and the war in East Timor, a country most people in America had never heard of before Kissinger and Nixon secretly approved its invasion by Pakistan.
Long after other foreign policy analysts had abandoned the Domino Theory—the idea that one communist regime would convert its neighbors—Kissinger doubled down. Though in 2018 he acknowledged miscalculating Vietnam as a “democratic country” that needed saving “from invasion” rather than one engaged in a civil war, he expressed no remorse for, say, the 1972 Christmas bombings that dropped 20,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnam, rendering parts of it a wasteland and killing thousands, including thirty-three U.S. airmen.
Sanger doesn’t omit Kissinger’s rages, which terrified his underlings and featured not only shouting but foot stamping and the hurling of objects. He also tallies the death toll attributed to Kissinger’s cruel vision of Realpolitik around the world: millions, the majority civilians, who if they survived the bombings and shootings often starved to death. In South America, Kissinger’s overthrow of the Allende government spread, ushering in authoritarian governments in Argentina and Brazil that tortured and killed college students, journalists and anyone perceived as a threat to autocracy. Bringing the Vietnam War to Cambodia led directly to the ascendency of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s genocide, which killed between 1.5 and 2 million people. Even today, Kissinger casts a shadow over Southeast Asia: in Cambodia and Laos, land mines regularly kill and maim farmers and their children—people who weren’t even born when the explosives were laid.
Growing up in Tokyo during Kissinger’s heyday, I felt his ruthlessness daily. The Vietnam War wasn’t simply shown on television every night; it was fought in Japan’s American military hospitals, where wounded GI’s were flown for surgery and rehabilitation. My mother spent long hours at the Yokosuka Naval Base reading to soldiers instead of me, her frequently bedridden daughter—my contribution to the war effort as well as hers. But as vivid as Kissinger was, it would be decades before I saw him in the flesh. When I finally did—in New York City at the turn of the millennium— the Vietnam War years came rushing back, and so did the dread.
Next time: Henry Kissinger, Jim Thompson, and Me