The Case Against Kissinger

By DAVID DALEY
The Hartford Courant
May 16, 2001

The heavens are shaking. The skies are livid.

A violent and sudden spring storm has swept through the lovely town green in Washington Depot, rattling Parks Drugstore ("Filling your prescription is the most important thing we do"), shaking the signs advertising the Little League ziti dinner and drenching the American flag outside town hall.

Hitchens, the British provocateur who likes his gin but not Mother Teresa, has come to the Hickory Stick bookshop to discuss his new book, "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," which makes the case for charging the former secretary of state with war crimes. Kissinger lives in Kent, about 20 miles away, and had been scheduled to appear at a local library benefit on this Saturday evening. He canceled.

"The Trial of Henry Kissinger" is a brutal and brilliant book, written with rage, punishing and unforgiving. It is a furious political accusation but also one benefiting from the recent release of CIA documents about U.S. involvement in Chile and the contemporaneous diaries of H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's right-hand man.

Hitchens raises the ghosts of U.S. foreign policy and charges Kissinger with culpability for, among other things, the "incitement and enabling of genocide" in East Timor, the "deliberate mass killing of civilian populations" in Indochina and the "personal involvement" in plans to assassinate foreign leaders in Cyprus and Chile. And he raises anew the allegations that in 1968, the Nixon campaign sabotaged the Paris peace talks designed to end the Vietnam War, only for the United States to accept essentially the same terms many years - and many thousands of lives - later.

"Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail or are awaiting trial or have been otherwise punished or discredited," Hitchens says. "His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist, then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anarcharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a stand."

As Hitchens reads, the afternoon as seen through the Hickory Stick's windows turns a toxic olive green, lit up by lightning flashes. Ancient anger is in the air.

Two hours later, the scene couldn't be more different. The gathering has adjourned up the hill to the picturesque home of Danny Pring, who has set out a British flag in her front yard as a welcome beacon. The sun has returned; the purple flowers glisten in the backyard; the strawberries taste so ripe. There is wine, cheese and gentle murmurs about war crimes. It could be a scene from Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers," if only everyone wasn't so nice and the lemon squares so deliciously tart.
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Christopher Hitchens answers questions after speaking at the Hickory Stick Book Store.

Hitchens is the brat at the garden party. Sipping sherry on the croquet court, ignoring the gnats that buzz about, he tosses off devastating historical analysis and witty, ironic banter, all while keeping his cigarette going. The first topic is why others in the media won't raise these allegations to Kissinger. After all, before Hitchens' indictment appeared as a two-part piece in Harper's magazine, Harper's had a long conversation with ABC's "Nightline" - where Kissinger is a regular - about doing a story, and both Hitchens and Kissinger are known to occasionally warm chairs with the likes of Charlie Rose, Brian Lamb and Chris Matthews. (Kissinger's office has had no comment on either the book or the Harper's series.)

"I've thought about it a lot. There are two reasons. One is general, one is particular," says Hitchens, 52. "The general one is cultural, I suppose. I'm almost tempted to call it denial, because to ask him, say, `Well, when you sat with the Indonesian generals in the same room as they gave the order for the invasion of East Timor, what did you say?' Now, why didn't they ask him that then? They didn't. So if they ask him now, they have to admit they missed the story. My profession is wonderful in many, many ways, but it doesn't like admitting it missed a story.

"I'm actually rather judgmental about this. I think the failure to ask now is bad, it was equally bad then, and the lapse in between is a queasy combination of realizing they missed the chance and realizing that they printed his version without questioning. In other words, they were being stenographers. When you go through the record and find out what's definitely true, the parallel track is a series of scuzzy, cheap, anti-intellectual lying of a breathtaking sort, most of which was swallowed by our great trade."

The other reason, Hitchens suggests, is in journalism's innate craving for something new. In an appendix, he describes what happens when Harper's took the story to "Nightline." They asked, "Is there anything new here?"

"Nothing new," says Hitchens, voice icy. "Well, actually yes. I would say there are some new things. It's fair to say a lot of it would not be new to someone in Bangladesh or Cambodia or Chile or Cyprus, but it would be new to people who rely on ABC News for their information. Then I realized I missed a chance, because they claimed to have read the book by then.

"I should have asked: Do you mean you knew all this? That you admit all this is true? There was no denial of veracity. If you dare say there's nothing new, you're admitting duplicity. It's such a big scandal that it can be invisible."

But while these charges against Kissinger remain somewhat invisible - though, with the book beginning to reach bestseller lists, they may not remain that way for long - Bob Kerrey's turmoil has filled the airwaves and front pages. That's a smaller story and, therefore, much different for people to grapple with, Hitchens suggests.

"Kerrey's easy, because we know roughly who he is; it's a story about healing and coming to grips with things and putting it behind you, and he once went out with Debra Winger. Everyone's invited to imagine, well, maybe you can think about what it would be like to be caught far from home in a nasty situation so young....Though I don't know what he would expect would happen to a Vietnamese doing that in Nebraska. They would say how traumatized they felt creeping across Nebraska in the dark, no doubt, but I don't think they'd get any sympathy for it.

"But he's not the one I wish ill to. As the law is designed to catch small fry, so it seems are our public ethics. I'm interested to see that people in print have said, well, look, free-fire zone and body count are not terms Kerrey came up with. He was under orders to behave in a certain area as if civilians were dead meat. That can't be nobody's fault. And since it's just after Nixon and Kissinger have intervened and made an unlawful covert pact to prolong the war - well, what Kerrey did to those women and kids was a month after Nixon took office, if you can bear to think about it. All for nothing, except vanity and power mania."

Hitchens knows there's no chance of the United States' offering Kissinger for a Nuremberg trial, though he adds that he never imagined the British House of Lords would deliver Augusto Pinochet to justice. He can't even imagine Kissinger ever offering any kind of apology for those killed around the world on his watch.

"Nothing seems to move him. The temptation, and maybe I'll resist it" - he doesn't - "is to make a judgment as to whether he's a reptile or a mammal. It's very hard to imagine him having a dark night of the soul. If he did, he couldn't stop. He'd need three lifetimes to think about what he did to the Chileans."

Hitchens knows what critics will say: He's a tendentious partisan; he's a target-seeking journalist; he's a radical revisionist; he once wrote a book attacking Mother Teresa, for heaven's sake.

"I can see why people think I'm an attack dog. But I've come by it honestly. I would be much happier writing about Oscar Wilde. I really would be," he says.

The point that Hitchens says he wants to make, however, is that the U.S. position on human rights internationally is untenable, inconsistent with this recent history, and demands an honest review.

"It's something people slightly suspect about the relationship between being a superpower and a human-rights cop. If the position is to be consistent, it needs a lot of cleanup, and the first thing that would need to be done is a careful accounting of history, and of the damage to the U.S. Constitution done by [Kissinger]. It's not an accounting that, if any other country in the world proposed to put off, would be countenanced by American opinion - intellectual, public or political. It's only because it's so glaring that it is postponed or people think it can be avoided.

"Well, I'm here to say it can't be - and so far I've had no argument. That's no tribute to me. That's a tribute to the evidence. There's too much of it now. It's steady and consistent and goes on for a long time, and no new discovery leads you away."

But here's a new discovery. Someone comes by with a copy of The Litchfield County Times, which has a story inside about Kissinger's backing out of that evening's Gunn Memorial Library event and Hitchens taking his place at a related private dinner. The headline: "Hitchens Is In But Kissinger Out At Washington Luminary Dinner."

"That is currently my favorite headline in the world. I think I can say I've lived to see that," he says, though he still sounds a little confused about why people would be just as happy to have him stand in for Kissinger. Hitchens concludes that maybe people believe that since both of them are on TV, one celebrity is as good as another.

"Celebrity culture consists of judging people's actions by reputation, not the other way around. You're famous; you must more or less be OK. This needs to be pissed on heavily at all times."

And so he heads toward the backyard party, then the evening's festivities, cigarette lit, shirt askew. Mingling awaits.

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