by Greg Grandin
Here, then, in the early winter of 1962, is an almost perfect exposition of what after September 11, 2001, would become known as the “one-percent doctrine,” as expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney declared that if there is even the slightest chance that a threat will be realized, the United States would act as if that threat were a foregone conclusion: “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence,” he said. “It’s about our response.”
“In the decade ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality,” Kissinger wrote in 1963, hoping momentum resulting from Kennedy’s bold actions in Cuba could carry over into other areas of foreign policy and build that “new world” he talked about with Schlesinger.26
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Kissinger’s first visit to South Vietnam was in October 1965, less than a year after Lyndon Baines Johnson decided to escalate the war with ground troops. There, he was briefed by Daniel Ellsberg, then stationed at the US embassy in Saigon. Kissinger took Ellsberg’s advice to not waste time talking to top officials but seek out Vietnamese or Americans who had been in the country for a long time. “I was impressed that Kissinger actually acted on my advice,” Ellsberg recalls.27 And what Kissinger learned troubled him deeply: Washington was relying on corrupt, unpopular, and incompetent Saigon allies, North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia made a military solution impossible, and the one pressure tactic the United States did have—the bombing of North Vietnam—would soon “mobilize world opinion against us.”*
Upon his return, Kissinger privately told Cyrus Vance and Averill Harriman, top Johnson officials, that “we couldn’t win.”28 But he continued to publically support the war effort. Why? It is impossible, of course, to answer that question definitively, to judge what mix of ambition, considered opinion, and moral judgment moved Kissinger to brush away his doubts and push on. But conceptually at least, he got caught in the vortex of his own circular argument: inaction has to be avoided in order to show that action is possible. The purpose of not questioning the projection of American power in Vietnam was to avoid weakening American purpose.
Upon returning from his first visit to South Vietnam in late 1965, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention. In early December, he joined 189 other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and fifteen other New England universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson’s policies would help the “people of South Vietnam … determine their own destiny.”29 “A Vietcong victory will spell disasters,” said the letter. Then, later that month, he led a Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war in a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United States on CBS. Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of North Vietnam, insisting that it was not a violation of international law. He also invoked the analogy of World War II, saying Washington’s actions in Indochina were as righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany.30
Bob Shrum, who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger’s team and says that when he today watches a recording of the debate he is “amazed by two things: how young we look, even Kissinger, and how wrong we were.”31
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Wrong or right, it didn’t much matter. For Kissinger it was win-win. If Vietnam had gone well, he could have claimed it as validation of his “little war thesis.” The war didn’t, of course, go well, leading Kissinger to confirm his original belief that America lacked the resolve necessary to fight either small or major wars. “I’m absolutely unreconstructed on that subject,” he said in 2011, referring to the United States’ defeat in Southeast Asia. “I believe that most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves.”*
2
Ends and Means
What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.
—Henry Kissinger
At Harvard as a graduate student, Henry Kissinger and his doctoral adviser, William Yandell Elliott, often took long Sunday walks together in Concord. On one of these outings, Elliott—described by the Harvard Crimson as “a large, flamboyant Virginian … a grandiose, hulking figure who often wore a white plantation suit and a Panama hat”—urged his protégé to live his life by Immanuel Kant’s famous ethical imperative: “Treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” That dictum was a response to the utilitarian calculus influential during Kant’s life that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the interests of the individual. Kant was especially appealing to arch–Cold Warriors like Elliott, who saw Soviet Communism as a vast, monstrous application of instrumental morality.
Kissinger was very familiar with Kant, having grappled, in his 1950 undergraduate thesis, with the paradox that is at the heart of Kantian philosophy: human beings are entirely free and history is inevitably advancing according to God’s divine plan toward a world of perpetual peace. Kissinger accepted Kant’s idea of freedom but, as a child of the Holocaust and an observer of the Gulag, couldn’t accept Kant’s theology, especially the belief that existence had a transcendent purpose. For Kissinger, the past was nothing but “a series of meaningless incidents.” History had no significance in itself. Whatever “meaning” human beings might assign to past events came not from the working out of a higher, external and objective moral plan, Kissinger argued, but subjectively, from within: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.”1
Kissinger, as a diplomat, is often described as amoral, as believing that values such as universal human rights have no role to play in the implementation of foreign policy. He reportedly once said, paraphrasing Goethe, that if he “had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other,” he would “always choose the latter.”2 This vision, though, isn’t amoral. Rather, contrary to Elliott’s injunction, it suggests a utilitarian, or relative, moralism: a greater good can be achieved for the greatest number of people when great powers do what they need to do to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system, which, in turn, might nurture whatever fragile justice human beings are capable of achieving.
Kissinger’s embrace of a relative, rather than an absolute, morality is suggested in another story from his graduate school days at Harvard. In 1953, during a seminar, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist.3 “Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” the professor said, in reaction to Kissinger’s lengthy exposition that argued that there was no such thing as truth. “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.”
Kissinger’s response effectively used Kantian existentialism (the idea that human beings are radically free) to undermine Kantian morality. “We can hardly insist,” he said, “on both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.” We can’t, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Kissinger admitted that some people might find such a position a “counsel of despair,” since it rejects the possibility of any foundational truth. But, he said, it was actually liberating since it allowed men to escape, however fleetingly, the misery of existence: “Our values are indeed necessary, but not because of an order of nature; rather, they are made necessary by the act of commitment to the metaphysics of a system. This may be the ultimate meaning of personality, of the loneliness of man, and also of his ability to transcend the inevitability of his existence,” Kissinger said.
Then, a bit later in the discussion, Kissinger quoted Kant’s moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.”*
Elliott didn’t seem to quite grasp the rad
ical existentialism of Kissinger’s position. When you talk about “contingent values,” he responded to Kissinger’s comment, you are referring to “that realm of freedom in which man has not learned that there is a plan beyond his own plan which he dimly and imperfectly recognizes that orients him toward God.” Elliott here was holding to a more standard interpretation of Kant, one that accepted the paradox that individuals were both radically free and that there was a divine “plan.” How, he asked Kissinger, could one “reconcile this demonic freedom … with a return to a divine will, through which man, through prayer, submits himself?” Kissinger didn’t answer, but a story told by the late journalist David Halberstam suggests that perhaps Kissinger’s relativism eventually rankled Elliott. At the professor’s retirement party, as colleagues gathered to say goodbye, Elliott “visited each with parting words. Almost all his comments were generous, until he came to Kissinger: ‘Henry,’ he began, ‘you’re brilliant. But you’re arrogant. In fact you’re the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.’ Kissinger became ashen-faced. ‘Mark my words,’ Elliott continued, ‘your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.’”4
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The details of Henry Kissinger’s political ascendance, how in a remarkably short period of time he became one of the most powerful men in American history, have been told before. And when they have, it has usually been to highlight their sordidness, to establish the transgression that made Kissinger’s rise possible: In late 1968, Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon were locked in a close race for the White House. The war in Vietnam was the critical issue of the election. With both candidates claiming to be the best chance for “peace,” any progress in informal talks then taking place in Paris between Washington and Hanoi would benefit Humphrey. Kissinger, still a Harvard professor, used his contacts in the outgoing Johnson administration, including a former student, to acquire information about the negotiations, which he then passed on to Nixon’s campaign. In turn, Nixon’s people used the intelligence to preempt a possible truce. Nixon won the election and, in gratitude, gave Kissinger the job of national security adviser.5
But the events need to be told again, not to rehearse culpability but because they capture nearly perfectly Kissinger’s philosophy of history. Kissinger in the fall of 1968 was applying in practice what he had long argued for in theory: an insistence that individuals have a degree of freedom in shaping historical events, that they are not bound by any “true structure,” that risk is a requirement of real statesmanship, that initiative creates its own reality, and that political leaders shouldn’t wait on the facts to seize that initiative. Transcendence was possible, despair could be avoided, and ends could be means or means could be ends. Quite so: negotiations to end the Vietnam War became the means of Kissinger’s ascent. Thus what William Elliott described as a “demoniac” individual freedom was reconciled to the metaphysics of the system—that is, to the national security state. Kissinger was working out his “relationship to the universe.”
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The story of Kissinger’s involvement in the 1968 campaign starts with a question: Why did Kissinger—a close associate of the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller and occasional adviser to Democratic administrations—decide to throw in with Nixon, whom he considered a resentful right-winger?
“Richard Nixon is the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President,” Kissinger said just before the Republican National Convention in Miami.6Kissinger was stunned, therefore, when Rockefeller lost to Nixon at that convention, according to the journalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb. “He wept,” they wrote.7 “Now the Republican Party is a disaster,” Kissinger said.8 “That man Nixon is not fit to be president.” He knew of what he spoke, for Kissinger had been in charge of keeping Rockefeller’s “shit files” on Nixon, “several filing cabinets” containing what today is called oppositional, or negative, research.9 After Nixon’s nomination, Kissinger slept through the morning, woken only by a telephone call from a friend. Kissinger, the friend later remarked, sounded “more shaken, more disappointed, more generally depressed than I had ever known him.” “That man Nixon,” Kissinger said, “doesn’t have the right to rule.”
Kissinger himself, at a public conference organized in 2010 by the State Department on American involvement in Vietnam, cited his opposition to Nixon as evidence that he couldn’t have been involved in schemes to get him elected: “I had never met Richard Nixon when he appointed me. And I had spent 12 years of my life trying to keep him from becoming President. I was the principal foreign policy advisor of Nelson Rockefeller. So when I read some of these books of how carefully I plotted my ascent to that office, I think it is important to keep—to remember that I was a close friend of Nelson Rockefeller and, actually, I knew Hubert Humphrey a lot better. Well, I didn’t know Nixon at all.”10
At that same conference, however, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke told a story that helps explain Kissinger’s accommodation. Holbrooke spoke immediately after Kissinger, reminiscing about 1968, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the protests and riots over race and war. “There’s never been a year like ’68 in our lives,” he said. Then Holbrooke described how that summer he and Kissinger were in Martha’s Vineyard, watching the Chicago Democratic Convention on TV. The police were beating protesters outside and Democrats were savaging each other inside. Nixon had already won his party’s nomination, and, with the “destruction of the Democratic Party” being broadcast to the nation, Kissinger turned to Holbrooke and said, “This is the end of me.” “You remember?” Holbrooke asked, gesturing to Kissinger in the audience. Kissinger is off camera, but the crowd laughed and maybe he did too.
Holbrooke sets an evocative scene: Kissinger, on a warm late August in Martha’s Vineyard, the summer heartland of America’s Eastern establishment, watching the televised disintegration of that establishment and experiencing one of the longest and darkest nights of his soul. He cried: “Nelson Rockefeller and Hubert Humphrey are being destroyed. I’ll never serve in the government again.”
The despair was fleeting. Kissinger acted immediately, positioning himself as useful to both the autumnal New Deal Democrats and the rising Republican Right. A few days after the Democratic Convention, Kissinger, still on the Vineyard and now sitting on a beach in West Tisbury, offered Rockefeller’s Nixon files to another summering Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, who was working for the Humphrey campaign. “It was a wonderful offer,” Huntington later recalled.11
One that Kissinger never made good on. Even as he was running down Nixon to the Democrats (“I’ve hated Nixon for years,” he said, stalling Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was trying to get Kissinger to turn over the files), he was reaching out to Richard V. Allen, one of Nixon’s top foreign policy advisers, to say that he would soon be traveling to Paris to assess the status of talks between Washington and Hanoi and would be available to advise the campaign on the matter. In Paris Kissinger cultivated contacts on Johnson’s negotiating team, including a lawyer named Daniel Davidson. Davidson admitted he was “charmed and enchanted” by Kissinger. As he put it, “he had an intelligence, a sense of humor, and a conspiratorial manner that swept you into his camp.”12
Holbrooke was also in the delegation: “Henry was the only person outside of the government we were authorized [by the White House, because of his past position as an adviser] to discuss the negotiations with,” he told Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.”13 When Kissinger returned to Cambridge two weeks later, he called the Nixon campaign again, reporting that “something big was afoot regarding Vietnam.” Kissinger advised that Nixon keep any statement on the war he might make vague, so as not to be “undercut by negotiations.” Diplomats in Paris were working on a deal: Johnson would halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and Hanoi would reciprocate by agreeing to enter into formal negotiatio
ns with South Vietnam.
Kissinger contacted Nixon’s staffers a number of times thereafter, speaking most often with Allen. It was Allen who first described, to Seymour Hersh, Kissinger’s role in derailing the talks and over the years he has elaborated: “Henry Kissinger, on his own, volunteered information to us through a spy, a former student, that he had in the Paris peace talks, who would call him and debrief, and Kissinger called me from pay phones and we spoke in German. The fact that my German is better than his did not at all hinder my communication with Henry and he offloaded mostly every night what had happened that day in Paris.”14
Kissinger placed his last call at the end of October. “I’ve got important information,” he said: the North Vietnamese had agreed to participate in official peace talks, scheduled to begin November 6, one day after the presidential vote. They had “broken open the champagne” in Paris, Kissinger reported. A few hours after Kissinger’s call to the Nixon campaign, Johnson suspended the bombing.15 Announcement of a deal between Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi might have pushed Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. But there would be no deal: the South Vietnamese scuttled the settlement, after hearing from Nixon’s campaign that they could get better terms from a Republican administration: “Saigon Cannot Join Paris Talks under Present Plan,” ran the above-the-fold November 2 headline of the New York Times.
Later that day, Nixon, campaigning in Austin, Texas, said: “In view of early reports this morning, prospects for peace are not as bright as they were even a few days ago.”16
Nixon’s people had acted fast. Using Kissinger’s intelligence and working through Anna Chennault (the Chinese-born widow of a World War II lieutenant general and a prominent conservative activist), they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks, promising better conditions were Nixon to be elected. President Johnson was informed of the meddling. Through wiretaps and intercepts, he learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese that Nixon was going to win and “to hold on a while longer.” If the White House had gone public with the information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. He feared that “Nixon’s conniving” was just too explosive. “This is treason,” he said. “It would rock the world.”17
