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Book Reviews: Kissinger Double Crosses The World

By Pete Zastrow

From reading Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power, it's abundantly clear that the price of power is far too high, and that we—tax payers, workers, veterans—are the ones who end up paying that price. While the book is about Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Kissinger paid nothing; neither did Nixon or Haig or most of the hundreds of other characters who cross the pages of this book.

Part of my own price was going to Vietnam. As Hersh makes clear, Kissinger was on the make long before Nixon won the White House; a noted Harvard professor, Kissinger had been used by the Administration of Lyndon Johnson to carry on behind-the-scenes negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968. Though not quite an official negotiator Kissinger made sure that he knew all the classified details and though his role was supposedly secret, he made sure that the right people (governmental and media) know of his view of his importance to the negotiations.

Meanwhile Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were campaigning for the presidency; Humphrey, then vice-president, could not escape partial responsibility for the twists and turns of foreign policy under President Johnson which had gotten the U.S. mired in Vietnam. The electorate greeted Nixon's campaign promises about "peace with honor" enthusiastically. And the intensity of negotiations in Paris increased in hopes of some kind of breakthrough before the November election.

Kissinger sold himself to the highest bidder. He let it be known to the Humphrey camp that he was available; at the same time he was playing footsie with Nixon advisors—and acting as semi-official negotiator in Paris.

In the clandestine world of political manipulation, it became known that Kissinger was under consideration for the job as National Security Advisor should Nixon win the White House. Nothing, of course, was written down; nothing, probably, was even agreed to between Kissinger and Nixon or a Nixon advisor. But it "became known." (One of the strongest points in the book is Hersh's consistent ability to trace this kind of web of inference, suggestion and hint where no one is quite responsible, no name appears on the dotted line, but all the players in the game seem to reach a common understanding on the results.) In return, Kissinger began to supply the Nixon camp with the most sensitive and secret of information coming from the Paris talks, talks which were in fact close to negotiating a ceasefire. And, as the election came down to the final days, Humphrey was gaining rapidly, to the point where a dramatic gesture such as a ceasefire could make Humphrey president.

The ceasefire didn't happen and, of course, Nixon won the election. With the information supplied by Kissinger, the Nixon camp persuaded President Thieu of South Vietnam to torpedo the talks, letting it be known that Thieu would fare better under a Nixon Administration than he would in the waning days of the Johnson Administration. Richard Allen (then coordinator for Nixon's foreign policy, later Reagan's National Security Advisor—the names in the book keep popping up in today's headlines as they are shuffled through job after job) said of Kissinger's help: "it was inevitable that Kissinger would have to be part of our administration... Kissinger had proven his mettle by tipping us. It took some balls to give us those tips..." It was, he said "a pretty dangerous thing for him to be screwing around with national security."

For over a million Americans the price for Kissinger to come to power was a tour in Vietnam since, had the peace process gone ahead, it's certainly possible that the war would have wound down in '68. As one who spent 1969 in Vietnam, my price was relatively small; for friends who returned home with minds, bodies and/or spirits shattered or for the families of those who didn't return home at all, the price was enormous—unpayable.

In the event after the event of the Nixon/Kissinger years, The Price of Power draws its indictments. There's Kissinger's refusal to take even the most elemental steps to prevent starvation after the Biafran War in Nigeria for fear that he might appear "soft" to a White House where "toughness" is so important (the Books make it clear that no matter how insane, if a proposal was hard-line enough, the proposer looked good). There's Kissinger's prolonged and tortuous maneuvering to underwrite the assassination of Allende in Chile and to install the present Pinochet military regime. In the Middle East, "The president and his national security advisor managed to escalate that civil strife (in Jordan in 1970)...with its local origins, into a direct big-power confrontation involving military alerts, deployment of aircraft carriers, and a presidential order to commit an act of warfare in the Middle East that was ignored by his Secretary of Defense"

There is Kissinger's overwhelming need to be the 'star," to gather all the strings into his own hands so that the puppets will dance to his tune. His drive to stand solo during arms talks with the Soviets led him to ignore specialists who had been negotiating for months with the result that he took positions which had to be retracted later—and that did nothing to speed arms agreements. And there is Kissinger's same desire to hog the spotlight during negotiations with the Peoples' Republic of China; Kissinger almost eclipsed Nixon which led to a temporary fall from favor. And there's the picture of Kissinger plotting targets for the secret bombing in Cambodia; Kissinger seems to be running for the job of emperor of the world, and almost made it.

His manipulations fill the book. From the start Kissinger set up his own channels of communications (backchannels) so he would not have to rely on State Department information (and so that the State Department wouldn't know what he knew). Since Kissinger's agents were as devious as he, at least one of his protégés, Alexander Haig, almost eclipsed Kissinger for basking in the Presidential limelight (and the power that flowed from it).

Because Kissinger was aware of his own trustworthiness, he naturally enough suspected anyone around him. The story of his taps on his assistants as well as newsmen runs through the book. More seriously, because Kissinger was consistently dealing double (or triple or more) he couldn't afford to let anyone know just what he was doing—including his closed aides. As a result, however, he refused advise from experts; in fact, a monumental ego seems to have given Kissinger the assurance that he knew all there was to know on almost any aspect of diplomacy, leading to equally monumental goofs—like his own solution to the war in Vietnam which came completely unglued with the Christmas bombing in 1973.

Seymour Hersh wrote the book which uncovered MY Lai, then the book which uncovered the cover up My Lai. He is a respected journalist and, as this book shows, an exhaustive researcher. When The Price of Power appeared it was noticed, even quoted, but then pretty much ignored. Perhaps the revelations are so frequent and so tied in to the history of the time that none of them rank as a major, newsworthy sensation. Perhaps we're all so used to governmental intrigue and lies that yet another collection of them makes scarcely a ripple.

This band of powerful men do have a life and death power over the rest of us. That the ego of a Kissinger or Nixon or any of the others needs a little stroke can send thousands of us off to war—that is the bottom line of The Price of Power. And the utter outrage that should follow the revelations in this book is, for whatever reason, missing; it shouldn't be. With its hundred of examples of the total cynicism of our "leaders" The Price of Power could hardly match the cynicism of the act of appointing Henry Kissinger to another position in the government where he can start his slithering toward the seat of power once again.

Pete Zastrow
VVAW National Office