At 100, more than a half-century of blood is on the elder statesman’s hands.Kissinger has always been adept at controlling the narrative of history, not least because he simply had the time to do so.
Henry
Kissinger is still alive and still in possession of the Nobel Peace Prize he
was awarded in 1973. Time will eventually address the former issue; as to the
latter, the Nobel Foundation has declared that “none of the prize awarding
committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered [revoking] a prize once
awarded.”
This year
marks both the fiftieth anniversary of Kissinger’s peace prize and his 100th
birthday. At this point, questioning the former Secretary of State’s right to
retain the award might seem both futile and vindictive. It is neither.
Kissinger
remains a lauded and deeply entrenched member of the Washington establishment.
Although Joe Biden is the first President since Richard Nixon not to invite
“Dr. K” to the White House, this has not kept Kissinger from making headlines.
In 2022, Politico revealed that the Biden Administration has consulted
Kissinger regularly; he published a new nonfiction bestseller, Leadership: Six
Studies in World Strategy; he spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations lecture
and warned that if a country’s educational system—ostensibly America’s—“becomes
increasingly focused on the shortcomings of its history,” then that country’s
“capacity to act internationally will be diverted into its internal struggles.”
Kissinger
has always been adept at controlling the narrative of history, not least
because he simply had the time to do so. Most of his similarly notorious
political colleagues are gone: Richard Nixon died in 1994; Kissinger’s
successor as National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, died in 2020;
Vietnamese general and politician Lê Đức Thọ, the co-recipient of the 1973 peace prize who
declined the award, died in 1990; and Robert C. Hill, a State Department
employee, ambassador, and eventual whistleblower who incurred Kissinger’s wrath more than once, died in 1978
at the age of sixty-one.
Hill’s
is not a name you see in “this day in history” listicles. In fact, it is not a
name you’ll often find in history books about the 1960s, Nixon, or Kissinger.
In part, this is due to his death more than forty years ago, but it is also due
to the trajectory of his career, which began with powerful roles within the
Republican Party machinery and in Nixon’s inner circle, but ended with Hill
sounding alarms about human rights abuses and murders from his post as
ambassador to Argentina during the 1976 military coup. As is the case with most
whistleblowers, Hill’s attempts to draw attention to wrongdoing in
Argentina—and his habit of questioning the State Department bureaucracy—led to
career marginalization and his erasure from history.
Self-described
“history detective” and author of a book on the Argentine military
dictatorship, Dossier Secreto, Martin Edwin Andersen is working to highlight
Hill’s career arc from political party insider to questioner of the party line.
Andersen himself is a former Justice Department employee whose career has been
derailed due to his whistleblowing. In two recent articles for the research
journal A Contracorriente, Andersen contrasts Hill’s journey from collaborator
to dissident with Kissinger’s legacy of what Washington insiders have
studiously avoided calling war crimes.
Born in
1917, Hill’s first ambassadorship was to Costa Rica. Prior to that, he had
worked as a banker and diplomat and gained experience in Latin American culture
and politics through his work with W.R. Grace & Company, a global entity
involved in the fabric, fertilizer, and machinery trades. In subsequent years,
he would serve as ambassador to El Salvador (1954-1955), Mexico (1957-1960),
Spain (1969-1972), and Argentina (1973-1977). He was influential in Republican
Party politics, serving as an aide-de-camp to Nixon as the two campaigned on
behalf of the party ticket in 1964 and 1966, and in his role as chair of the
Republican National Committee Foreign Policy Task Force from 1965 to 1968.
As
Andersen reveals in his article “The Ultimate Unmasking of Henry Kissinger,” in
1968, Hill was not only an insider, but also a collaborator in the possibly
treasonous sabotage of the Vietnam War peace process. In 1968, as Richard Nixon
and Hubert Humphrey faced off in a close and contentious presidential contest,
Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration was engaging in the 1968 Paris Peace Talks
meant to end the Vietnam War. What happened next was something that Christopher
Hitchens, in his 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, claims was an “open
secret” in Washington: “In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his
emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on
Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: They privately assured the South
Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them
a better deal than would a Democratic one.”
This
secret has long been whispered, but it has taken decades and numerous
investigative journalists and historians to more substantively piece together
the mechanisms by which the peace talks were derailed. In 2000, Andersen notes,
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s book The Arrogance of Power finally revealed
Hill’s role in the failure of the 1968 peace talks. For Nixon and his campaign
to be able to communicate their willingness to offer a better deal to the South
Vietnamese should the Republicans win the presidency, Nixon needed a way to
communicate with the government in Saigon. He found his conduit in former
journalist and Republican Party fundraiser extraordinaire Anna Chennault, who
agreed to use her contacts in South Vietnam to get Nixon’s overtures delivered
to South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu.
The link
between Nixon’s people and Chennault was none other than party stalwart Robert
C. Hill, who knew Chennault and, in 1967, personally escorted her to a meeting
at Nixon’s New York City apartment. At that meeting, Chennault agreed to act as
Nixon’s liaison to South Vietnam and later indicated she would always be
reachable through Hill.
On the
other side of the equation, a consultant to the Johnson Administration on the
peace process stood ready to pass information from the 1968 peace talks to
Nixon, who then did his utmost to sabotage them, even though, according to the
Logan Act, it is illegal for U.S. citizens “to engage in unauthorized diplomacy
with foreign countries with intent to ‘influence the measures or conduct’ of a
foreign government.” The informant from within the talks? None other than Henry
Kissinger, who used his role as Johnson’s adviser at the peace talks to help
secure Nixon’s 1968 victory.
The war
in Vietnam would continue until, as Hitchens notes, “four years later the Nixon
Administration concluded the war on the same terms that had been on offer in
Paris [in 1968].” The difference was, of course, that in the intervening four
years, thousands more U.S. military personnel would die, as well as an unknown
but believed to be immense number of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian
military members and civilians. On January 23, 1973, the peace talks’ two main
negotiators, Kissinger and North Vietnamese military leader and Politburo
member Lê Đức Thọ, initialed what became known as the Paris Peace Accords, the agreement
meant to end the Vietnam War. The accords were signed by the participating
governments on January 27.
In 1968,
Kissinger and Hill had worked together for the greater political gain of their
candidate. Kissinger’s rewards became clear during Nixon’s first term: In 1968,
Nixon named him his National Security Adviser; in 1973, Nixon also made him his
Secretary of State. He continued in both roles—the first and only person to
hold them both simultaneously—until late 1975.
Hill failed
to achieve similar heights in his political career. Although he was
instrumental in the 1968 machinations that gave Nixon the presidency, Hill’s
habit of paying more attention to the situations on the ground in the countries
where he served than to consolidating his own power and influence had long made
him feel like an outsider in the State Department establishment. As early as
the late 1950s, while serving as ambassador to Mexico, Hill tried to warn then
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about Fidel Castro’s communist
connections, and that a regime change from Fulgencio Batista to Castro might be
disastrous for U.S. interests. This was not what Dulles or his colleagues back
in Washington wanted to hear. After meeting with his staff and asking them, “Is
it worth it for me to get canned, to go to the White House to fight this one
out?” Hill decided it was not.
But the
clearest divergence between Kissinger and Hill came in 1973 and beyond, with
Kissinger entrenched in his double roles as National Security Adviser and
Secretary of State, and Hill serving as ambassador to Argentina.
On March
24, 1976, Argentine Army Commander General Jorge Rafael Videla, along with two
others in a three-man military junta, overthrew President Isabel Perón and took
the oath of office. Over the course of the next several years, Videla’s
military dictatorship would engage in what became known as Argentina’s “Dirty
War,” during which “more than 20,000 people, including leftist guerrillas,
nonviolent dissidents, and even many uninvolved citizens” were kidnapped,
tortured, and murdered, as Andersen wrote in an open letter to President Barack
Obama in 2016.
In a 1987
article for The Nation titled “Kissinger and the ‘Dirty War,’ ” Andersen noted
that Hill, still the ambassador in Buenos Aires after the 1976 coup, reported
on the increasingly troubling human rights violations occurring in the country.
In September of that year, Hill wrote a confidential memo to Kissinger, urging
the United States to vote against giving Argentina an international bank loan,
in the hopes that denying the loan would give him leverage to encourage the
Argentine leaders to ease up on their violent crackdowns on dissidents. That
memo was given to Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman, who advised
Hill that Kissinger wanted to approve the loan. If Hill persisted, Shlaudeman
suggested, Kissinger might fire him. Hill told Shlaudeman to send the memo
anyway.
By 1977,
Hill was so disillusioned by what he had seen of Kissinger’s fanning the flames
in the aftermath of the coup that he met with President Jimmy Carter’s
Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Patricia Derian, to
reveal his smoking gun about a meeting between Argentina’s foreign minister,
Admiral César Guzzetti, and Kissinger, that had taken place in June 1976. The
Argentines had gone into that meeting, Hill reported, worried that Kissinger
would “lecture to them on human rights,” only for Kissinger to conclude by
merely suggesting to Guzzetti that whatever the military dictators felt they
needed to do to “clean up the problem,” they should do it before the end of the
year. Hill described this as Kissinger giving the Argentines the “green light”
for their murderous activities.
In 2004,
Kissinger’s statement in the meeting with Guzzetti was confirmed in a
declassified document released by the National Security Archive. In that
document, Kissinger was quoted as saying, “We are aware you are in a difficult
period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist
activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must
establish authority.”
In
assuring Guzzetti that the administration would look the other way while the
leaders of Argentina’s junta did their bloody work, Kissinger was following a
playbook that had already worked for him barely a year earlier. In late 1975,
the former Portuguese colony of East Timor (now Timor-Leste) was invaded by
Indonesia, the opening act in Indonesia’s occupation of that country until 1999
that resulted in, by some estimates, nearly 200,000 casualties. In 2001,
declassified documents would prove that President Gerald Ford and Kissinger
told Indonesian President Suharto during a December 1975 meeting in Jakarta
that they would not oppose the invasion. Ford told Suharto, “We understand the
problem and the intentions you have.” Kissinger, meanwhile, worried about how
to make the Indonesian invasion, undertaken with American weapons in violation
of Congressional restrictions, look like a self-defensive maneuver. As he would
in Argentina, Kissinger told Suharto, “It is important that whatever you do
succeeds quickly.”
Although
there have been requests to get Kissinger to testify in court regarding his
past, as well as attempts by activists to arrest him for war crimes, his
reputation has largely remained untarnished. In contrast, Kissinger took at
least one opportunity to try and posthumously disparage Hill. In 1987, after
Andersen’s piece ran in The Nation, publisher Victor Navasky received a letter
from Kissinger in which the former Secretary of State claimed—snarkily, and
with little fear of rebuttal, as Hill had been dead for nearly a decade—that
nobody ever remembered Hill as a “passionate human rights advocate.”
There
have, however, been calls for questionably awarded Nobel Peace Prizes to be
revoked, and Kissinger’s prize is often at the top of those lists.
In
addition to never considering the revocation of a peace prize once given, the
Nobel Committee has also stated that it will “never comment upon what the Peace
Prize Laureates may say and do after they have been awarded the prize.” Unni
Turrettini, the author of Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption
Behind the Nobel Peace Prize, tells The Progressive that she believes this
policy does a disservice to the award: “The Nobel Committee, when refusing to
revoke prizes in light of new and damaging information, not only erodes trust
and credibility in the peace prize as an institution, but it also harms the
efforts of people they are championing. If new evidence against Kissinger
proves he never was worthy of Nobel’s prize, allowing him to keep it is an
insult to Alfred Nobel, the other laureates, and to the world.”
Like the
machinations of Kissinger’s global negotiations, many of which were not
revealed until decades later, the Nobel Committee also shrouds its work in
secrecy; deliberations about the peace prize are kept confidential for fifty years
after they are awarded. In January 2023, it was finally revealed that the
committee awarded the prize to Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ even though it recognized there was
a good chance the 1973 Peace Accords would not actually lead to peace.
Andersen
concludes in his 2022 exposé that “Hill underwent a palpable process of
cognitive dissonance and political redemption; Kissinger chose all manners of
complicity in crimes heinous and cruel.”
Kissinger’s
greatest skill has been manipulating the political narrative to his advantage,
despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It will take actual leaders, truly
devoted to raising society to visions of peace, to bring about the revocation
of Kissinger’s peace prize, and to begin to undo his blood-soaked legacy.
***Sarah
Cords is a children’s nonfiction book author and lives in Wisconsin.
****More:
https://progressive.org/magazine/kissingers-culpability-cords/