by Greg Grandin
26. For Kissinger’s “harder line,” see National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Tapes, Oval Office, Conversation No. 517-4. No classification marking; available at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve10/d42#fn1. At this point, there is not much more to say about Kissinger’s involvement in Chile. His defenders will continue to defend, to read the evidence in the narrowest possible way so as to achieve maximum plausible denial. As chair of the interagency 40 Committee, Kissinger helped organize a comprehensive program of destabilization that financed anti-Allende newspapers, channeled money through third parties to opposition unions, increased aid to the military, sabotaged the economy, ran “black operations to divide and weaken” Allende’s coalition, and provided funds to the conservative National Party to create the paramilitary group Patria y Libertad, a death squad. “Our hand doesn’t show on this one,” Nixon said to Kissinger shortly after the coup. But over the years, leaked and declassified US documents have shown Nixon and Kissinger’s fingerprints everywhere. See Scott Horton’s post, “The Case against Kissinger Deepens,” July 6, 2010, on Kissinger’s admitting that the CIA did, in fact, kill General René Schneider in 1970 in order to prevent Allende’s coming to power, in an operation in which Kissinger continues to deny involvement: http://harpers.org/blog/2010/07/the-case-against-kissinger-deepens-continued/. See the documents at the National Security Archive’s “Kissinger and Chile: The Declassified Record, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/.
27. “Kissinger Defends 1970s Latin American Policy,” an AP story published in the Michigan Daily, October 5, 2004.
28. See the US documents collected at the National Security Archive’s “New Declassified Details on Repression and U.S. Support for Military Dictatorship,” at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB185/. All the documents cited in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, can be found at the National Security Archive Web site.
29. There is no indication, in the transcript of the conversation, that Kissinger had a private sidebar with Pinochet during their meeting. But Kissinger made sure to handpick that meeting’s note taker, his trusted aide William Rogers. “I could work with him afterwards,” he had said. The note taker for his meeting with Guzzetti, who did record that Kissinger had a “word alone” with the admiral, was Luigi R. Einaudi, a career diplomat.
30. Http://www.desaparecidos.org/notas/2008/01/los-militares-argentinos-calcu.html.
31. For Condor, see J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (2005), and John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (2004). For the documents cited below, including those related to Kissinger’s meeting with Cavajal and Pinochet, along with Letelier’s murder, see the National Security Archive: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB312/.
32. “Leader’s Torture in the ’70s Stirs Ghosts in Brazil,” New York Times, August 4, 2012.
33. “Militares brasileiros tiveram aula em instituto americano sobre como praticar tortura,” O Globo, October 12, 2014; available at http://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/militares-brasileiros-tiveram-aula-em-instituto-americano-sobre-como-praticar-tortura-14789322#ixzz3Ok1djNjO.
34. For Mujica, see Telesur English, “Mujica Opens Health Unit in Jail Where He Was Tortured,” November 11, 2014; available at http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mujica-Opens-Health-Unit-in-Jail-Where-He-Was-Tortured-20141111-0055.html. For Bachelet: “Former Chilean Military Officers Jailed for 1974 Death of President Bachelet’s Father,” Guardian, November 21, 2014.
35. House of Representatives, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Africa, United States-Angolan Relations (1978), p. 13. See also Kevin Danaher, The Political Economy of U.S. Policy toward South Africa (1982), pp. 132–33.
8: INCONCEIVABLE
1. Miller Center, University of Virginia, Presidential Recordings Project, Nixon Conversation 620-008; available at: http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/rmn-620-008.
2. John Kenneth White, The New Politics of Old Values (1990), p. 15. For Kissinger’s ongoing opinion of Reagan in the footnote, see Schlesinger, Journals, pp. 512, 519, 538; “‘Off Record’ Kissinger Talk Isn’t,” New York Times, April 20, 1986.
3. “Reagan Launches Attack on Ford, Kissinger,” Daily News, March 5, 1976.
4. Ronald Reagan Paid Political Broadcast, March 31, 1976, 9:30 p.m.–9:59 p.m., Vanderbilt Television News Archives.
5. “Reagan Appeals for G.O.P. Crusade,” New York Times, May 23, 1968.
6. For détente, see Louisa Sue Hulett, Decade of Détente: Shifting Definitions and Denouement (1982); Alexander Florey Woolfson, “The Discourse of Exceptionalism and U.S. Grand Strategy, 1946–2009,” PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2012; Michael B. Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente: Coming to Terms (1991). “Top Secret, Memorandum of Conversation,” February 9, 1973, White House, Collection: Kissinger Transcripts; accessed via Proquest’s Digital National Security Archive database.
7. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 37.
8. For détente as a possible solution to the economic crisis of Keynesianism, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (1986).
9. Ronald Reagan Paid Political Broadcast, March 31, 1976.
10. Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (1976), p. 319.
11. Ronald Reagan Paid Political Broadcast, March 31, 1976.
12. For the 1968 quotation, see Brian P. Janiskee and Ken Masugi, eds., The California Republic: Institutions, Statesmanship, and Policies (2004), 248.
13. Cited in Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (2006), p. 209.
14. J. Peter Scoblic, U.S. vs Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror (2008), p. 94.
15. Anne Hessing Cahn and John Prados, “Team B: The Billion Dollar Experiment,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 1993 (This is actually two separate articles under the combined title. The quote comes from Cahn’s essay). See also Cahn’s Killing Détente: The Right Attacks the CIA (2010).
16. The Bamford quotation comes from Jeff Stein, “Bush Team Sought to Snuff CIA Doubts,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 2005, as does the preceding quotation.
17. Jerry Wayne Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (1983), p. 198.
18. Cahn, Killing Détente, p. 186
19. Barry Werth, in 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today (2006), p. 341, writes that Team B “became the rallying point for opposition to détente and arms control”; “Rumsfeld and Cheney drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House,” and “the vaunted Nixon-Kissinger realism in foreign affairs was at last stalled, if not defeated.” See also Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980 (2010).
20. For the “morality plank,” see Robert Merry, Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (2008), p. 165.
21. “A Tough Warning from the Right-Wing,” Washington Post, January 26, 1975.
22. Schlesinger, Journals, p. 439.
23. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 37.
24. John Chamberlin,” “Kissinger Gave Up on Military Might,” appearing in, among other papers, Lebanon, Pennsylvania’s Daily News, and Coshocton, Ohio’s Tribune, June 6, 1975.
25. Department of State, Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 1880 (July 7, 1975). See also Sargent, A Superpower Transformed, pp. 165–97. Jeane Kirkpatrick would later in a famous essay, “Dictators and Double Standards” (published in Commentary in late 1979), focus on the increasing use of the word “interdependence” by liberals and int
ernationalists as an example of their post-Vietnam crisis of confidence and moral abdication.
26. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011), p. 25.
27. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, p. 39.
28. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1984 (1986), p. 1002.
9: CAUSE AND EFFECT
1. “In an Interview, Pol Pot Declares His Conscience Is Clear,” New York Times, October 23, 1997.
2. Cited in Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 394–95.
3. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 396.
4. “A Death in Cambodia; Evil Has Its Reasons,” Guardian, April 17, 1998.
5. Does America Need a Foreign Policy, p. 264, for example.
6. There are defenses of Kissinger’s Cambodia policy. For a useful summary of such arguments, as well as a convincing rebuttal, see James Tyner, The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide, and the Unmaking of Space (2008).
7. “Possible Bombing of Cambodia,” Top Secret, Memorandum of Conversation, February 9, 1973. National Archives. Nixon Presidential Materials Staff. National Security Council Files; accessed via the Digital National Security Archive.
8. National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts, box 19, chronological file. No classification marking; available at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v10/d27#fn1.
9. Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 (2004), p. 390. The historian Tony Judt, himself a passionate anti-Communist and debunker of justifications of left-wing repression, put it bluntly: “Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot” (See “What Have We Learned, If Anything,” The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008).
10. For the following discussion and quotations, see Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (2014), especially pp. 16–25. Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969–1973,” Vietnam Generation 1:1, Winter 1989, p. 8.
11. For the quotations, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, pp. 21–23, and How Pol Pot Came to Power, pp. 350, 371.
12. Kissinger, Diplomacy, p. 694.
13. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 45.
14. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 501, 514.
15. Memcon, Kissinger, and Swank, Bangkok, 9 February 1973, cited in Philip Dunlop, “Sideshow Revisited: Cambodia and the Failure of American Diplomacy, 1973,” MA Thesis, University of British Columbia (201), p. 26. Available here: https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/24240/ubc_2010_spring_dunlop_philip.pdf?sequence=1. See also Kiernan, “The American Bombardment,” p. 35.
16. National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Kissinger Office Files, box 75, Kissinger Conversations at Zavidovo, May 5–8, 1973. Top Secret; Sensitive; Exclusively Eyes Only; available at http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v15/d112#fn1.
17. For the “murderous thugs” quotation in the footnote, see “Memorandum of Conversation, ‘Secretary’s Meeting with Foreign Minister Chatchai of Thailand,’ November 26, 1975, 1:00 p.m., State Department, Secret/Nodis”; available at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB193/HAK-11-26-75.pdf. For the “homicidal clique” quotation, see Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 499.
18. Commentary (1952), review of H. Stuart Hughes’s Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate.
19. Hughes, Oswald Spengler, p. 72.
10: ONWARD TO THE GULF
1. “Adviser with No One to Advise,” Washington Post, April 14, 1980.
2. Official Report of the Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Republican National Convention Held in Detroit, Michigan (1980), pp. 373–77.
3. “The Special Ops Surge,” January 16, 2014, Tomdispatch.com, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175794/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_secret_wars_and_black_ops_blowback/. See also Linda Bilmes and Michael Intriligator, “How Many Wars Is the US Fighting Today?,” Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy (2013).
4. Danaher, The Political Economy of U.S. Policy, p. 132, cites a number of sources describing Kissinger’s use of Israel and South Africa as proxies in Angola in 1973. And Harold Koh, The National Security Constitution (1990), p. 53, notes that then director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, refused to confirm in testimony that Washington actually cut off all assistance to its Angolan rebels.
5. See Schlafly’s remarks: http://reagan2020.us/remembering/schlafly.asp. See also her book, coauthored with Chester Ward, Kissinger on the Couch (1975).
6. Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1984), p. 93.
7. “Latin Panel’s Soviet Finding Is Challenged by Moynihan,” New York Times, January 13, 1984.
8. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker on the Kissinger Commission: “President Reagan’s decision to set up a ‘bipartisan’ national commission to underpin his unpopular Central American policy is bad news for more reasons than the rebirth of Henry Kissinger.… The plan extends the already worrisome practice of turning over hard-fought political issues to supposedly blue-ribbon, non-governmental commissions. When such a panel delivers what appears to be an arbitrator’s Solomonic decision in substitute for the political judgments of Congress and the president, the result is dangerous to oppose and even difficult to modify.” Considering Kissinger’s actions in Chile, Wicker said, “a less appropriate person to act as arbiter of policy anywhere in Latin America could not be found this side of General Pinochet” (“Hiding behind Henry,” New York Times, July 19, 1983). As late as 1989, Vice President Dan Quayle was invoking the Kissinger Commission to justify an ongoing hard line: “I believe it was best spelled out in the Kissinger Report, which was produced in the early 1980s by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.”
9. Report, p. 102.
10. See Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1986, for Shultz’s comment in the footnote.
11. “They Can’t Just Sit There Any Longer,” Washington Post, October 24, 1983.
12. “TV: Reports and Debates on Crisis,” New York Times, October 27, 1983.
13. “Medals Outnumber G.I.’s in Grenada Assault,” New York Times, March 30, 1984.
14. “O’Neill Now Calls Grenada Invasion ‘Justified,’” New York Times, November 9, 1983.
15. Interview with Brent Scowcroft, Miller Center, University of Virginia, November 12–13, 1999; available at http://millercenter.org/president/bush/oralhistory/brent-scowcroft.
16. “Panama Crisis: Disarray Hindered White House,” by Andrew Rosenthal and Michael Gordon, New York Times, October 8, 1989.
17. “Resurrected and Visible,” Australian Financial Review, October 13, 1989.
18. “Remarks to Organization of American States” (December 22, 1989), reprinted in Panama: A Just Cause, U.S. Dept. of State Current Policy document no. 1240, p. 3.
19. “Press Conference with President Bush,” Federal News Service, December 21, 1989.
20. Richard Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (2009); George Will, “Drugs and Canal Are Secondary: Restoring Democracy Was Reason Enough to Act,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 22, 1989.
21. Likewise, the moderation of George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, has often been contrasted favorably with the rashness of the neocons in the post-9/11 years. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989, however, Powell was a strong supporter of the invasion. It was Powell who pushed for a more exalted name to brand the war with, one that undermined the very idea of those “limits” he was theoretically trying to establish. Following Pentagon practic
e, the operational plan to capture Noriega was to go by the meaningless name of “Blue Spoon.” That, Powell wrote in My American Journey (1995), was “hardly a rousing call to arms.… [So] we kicked around a number of ideas and finally settled on … Just Cause. Along with the inspirational ring, I liked something else about it. Even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.” Yet since the pursuit of justice is infinite, it’s hard to see what your exit strategy is once you claim it as your “cause” (recall that George W. Bush’s original name for his Global War on Terror was to be Operation Infinite Justice).
