PHOTO: Richard Nixon and Secretary of State/National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Nixon congratulates Henry Kissinger after he's sworn in as secretary of state in 1973 at the White House, making the German-born Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 the first foreign-born American citizen to hold the diplomatic U.S. role. Photo: Via Getty Images
“...Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity.
Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.
Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”
Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.
Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake.
IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live.
On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.”
Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency.
Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.
The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.
Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work.
He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others.
Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt.
In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents.
Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order.
In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.”
Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory.
That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be.
Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?
But Iraq, and the broader War on Terror that Kissinger wanted expanded lest it “pete[r] out into an intelligence operation while the rest of the region gradually slides back to the pre-9/11 pattern,” presaged the world Kissinger made coming apart at the foundations. The man who repositioned U.S. foreign policy as a wedge between Russia and China lived long enough to see the February 4 Declaration uniting Moscow and Beijing. The reactionary forces he encouraged at home and abroad are showing the world that the rules-based international order is about capitalism, not democracy.
Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh.”
-- Spencer Ackerman, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies”, Rolling Stone, November 29, 2023
Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.
Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”
Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.
Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake.
IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED. But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live.
On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.”
Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency.
Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.
The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.
Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work.
He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others.
Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt.
In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents.
Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order.
In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.”
Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory.
That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be.
Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?
But Iraq, and the broader War on Terror that Kissinger wanted expanded lest it “pete[r] out into an intelligence operation while the rest of the region gradually slides back to the pre-9/11 pattern,” presaged the world Kissinger made coming apart at the foundations. The man who repositioned U.S. foreign policy as a wedge between Russia and China lived long enough to see the February 4 Declaration uniting Moscow and Beijing. The reactionary forces he encouraged at home and abroad are showing the world that the rules-based international order is about capitalism, not democracy.
Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh.”
-- Spencer Ackerman, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies”, Rolling Stone, November 29, 2023
