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Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.
Daily News (New York)

February 17, 1999, Wednesday

SECTION: Gossip; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 968 words

HEADLINE: NEW HITCHENS BUZZ: HOLOCAUST DENIAL

BYLINE: BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH MARCUS BARAM AND K.C. BAKER

BODY:

Christopher Hitchens is crying slander.

The famously contrarian Vanity Fair writer - who gave House prosecutors a sworn statement that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal told him Monica Lewinsky was a "stalker" - has a fresh fight on his hands.

Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein has alleged Hitchens once claimed "the Holocaust was a fiction."

The author of books on the JFK assassination and industrialist Armand Hammer, Epstein is sending E-mails to friends in the media charging Hitchens revealed his views during a dinner in 1995 at the Royalton Hotel.

Hitchens shocked "everyone at the table," says Epstein, by claiming: "no evidence of German mass murder had ever been found and what gruesome artifacts had been found had been fabricated after the event."

Hitchens - who has besmirched the likes of Mother Teresa and Princess Di - calls the charge "slander," but says he won't dignify it with a denial.

"He knows he said it," says Epstein, who's willing to allow that Hitchens may have been "joking, or playing devil's advocate."

Hitchens, whose mother is Jewish, has defended the scholarship of Holocaust-"debunker" David Irving on First Amendment grounds. But he insists, "I don't think I would have made it a subject for humor in mixed company."

Vogue editor Anna Wintour and restaurateur Brian McNally, who were at the dinner table, both say they don't remember Hitchens denying the Holocaust. "It's nonsense," says Hitchens' friend McNally.

Hitchens suspects Epstein - who has called his impeachment affidavit "despicable" - may be spreading the tale to get back at him for his treatment of Blumenthal.

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"I'm not a supporter of Clinton," argues Epstein. "In fact, I think highly of Ken Starr. I think Hitchens is insane."

Hitchens - who calls Epstein an "impossible boor" - sees one good thing coming out of the feud: "I've now got a good reason to avoid him."

McGwire & Sosa - can't picture it

A little rivalry between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa?

The two sultans of swat had only generous words for each other last summer as they battled for the home-run record. But they kept their distance at ESPN's ESPY awards Monday at Radio City.

One photographer tried to get McGwire to pose with "your good buddy" Sosa. According to the lensman, McGwire huffed, "My buddy?" McGwire only agreed to the shot after Sosa approached McGwire.

As for granting autographs, Sosa was happy to sign away at the Four Seasons after-party. McGwire refused to autograph baseballs commemorating his milestone, even for some kids.

A St. Louis Cardinals rep said she hadn't heard of any animosity between McGwire and Sosa, but acknowledged that McGwire isn't keen on signing autographs.

None of this stopped ESPY presenters Ben Affleck and Vince Vaughn from dashing around Radio City Music Hall like a couple of cub scouts - chatting up McGwire, Sosa, David Wells and Cal Ripken Jr.

Jerry Seinfeld also had to shake Sosa's hand at the party that Yankee Derek Jeter threw afterward at Float. Sosa jokingly reminded Seinfeld to use the long-distance phone discount he touts on TV. Countered Seinfeld: "And you remember to use that American Express card!"

A pain in the foot for Leo

Leonardo DiCaprio has been hobbling around the Thai set of his new movie, "The Beach." The star nearly passed out after a red jellyfish nailed him during a scene where he had to swim through the Andaman Sea.

He's also feeling the sting of environmentalists who've relentlessly protested the film's use of a national park.

"In all this controversy my name has been used as symbolic of what's going on," he tells the L.A. Times. "That's upsetting to me, because I don't want a bad reputation as somebody who endorses something which is hostile to the environment."

Surveillance

IT COULD be getting serious between former senator Al D'Amato and "Sex and the City" author Candace Bushnell. The pair just returned from a weekend in Palm Beach a

JOCELYNE WILDENSTEIN flirted outrageously with some of guys at the bash that David LaChapelle threw at Bowery Bar last week. The Bride, who partied with Isaac Mizrahi and Betsey Johnson, was also entertained by a drag queen who danced naked on the tables a

Itemizing

JANET JACKSON must be humming her hit single "I Get Lonely" these days. The pop diva just broke up with her long-time beau, Rene Elizondo. Jackson dated him for more than a decade following her short-lived marriage to James Decharge... x"NEWS RADIO" star Andy Dick took off his pants during a profanity-laced show in front of students at the University of North Florida on Saturday night. Dick's hijinks apparently didn't impress the undergrads. Most headed for the exits. Police say they're considering charging him with indecent exposure. His response: "Hey, it's not for everybody." a

CAMERON DIAZ almost didn't survive filming "There's Something About Mary." The actress reveals that she almost died after a night out drinking in Australia. "It nearly killed me. I was on a beach drinking margaritas, Champagne and

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LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

February 21, 1999, Sunday

SECTION: Gossip; Pg. 14

LENGTH: 978 words

HEADLINE: JULIA S DAY OF RAGE, AS TOLD BY NOLTE

BODY:

Don't look for Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte to work together again.

The Oscar-nominated Nolte is still smarting from a falling-out he reportedly had with the Pretty Woman on the set of their 1994 movie, "I Love Trouble."

In a new bio, "Nick Nolte: Caught in the Act," author Mel Weisser says the actor told him during the shoot that "I try to talk to Julia, but she won't even look at me now."

The actor said he couldn't figure out what he had done to offend Roberts.

"I even went to her trailer to apologize for whatever it was, I said I'd take full responsibility, but she started to hit me and threw me out, screaming, 'aeYou're no man! You're weak! You're not a man!' "

Roberts' rep declined to comment, except to say the story "sounds absolutely crazy."

Nolte's rep said he hasn't yet read the book, out next month from Momentum.

The actor apparently got on much better with Gwyneth Paltrow during the making of "Jefferson in Paris." The Oscar-nominated actress was especially good about helping him cope with his weight gain.

One day on the set, writes Weiser, Nolte, dressed as Thomas Jefferson, screamed, "Somebody get me out of these pants! I'm dying!"

Paltrow began tugging wildly, causing Nolte to fall on the floor. "Faster!" he moaned. "I'm not going to make it!"

Weiser, who was present, says Paltrow ended up dragging him around the room till "the rest of us almost collapsed in hysteria."

Also among Nolte's favorite actresses was Katharine Hepburn, though their friendship proved costly. According to Weiser, Hepburn wanted to take a day off when they were shooting "Grace Quigley" and told the producers, "Nick and I will split what it costs, won't we, Nick?"

Weiser says Nolte agreed, only to learn later that the day off would cost him $ 25,000.

Said Nolte to Hepburn: "Do me a favor, Katy, don't ever volunteer me again."

Bruce Willis on culture

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Bruce Willis is ranting against the Hollywood machine - the same one that made him rich.

At the Berlin Film Festival to promote his "Breakfast of Champions," the action star railed that "the studios won't touch anything to do with culture; they're strictly out for the dollar. I know studio heads who are patrons of opera and architecture, but they will not help their own young film makers."

The star of such art films as "Die Hard" and "Armageddon" added: "I foresee a day when they finally bore audiences to death, and then we will say to them, *are You forget how to tell stories?*"

But Willis didn't spend all of his time on the cinema. He served as guest deejay at the city's Planet Hollywood, ripping off his T-shirt and dancing on top of the tables.

Hitchens may take it to court

Controversial scribe Christopher Hitchens is ready to go to war.

The Vanity Fair columnist may file a slander suit against author Edward Jay Epstein for claiming Hitchens once contended the Holocaust never happened.

Epstein sent an E-mail message to media insiders several weeks ago charging that Hitchens had offered a detailed argument denying WWII genocide at a dinner in 1995.

"He is a really demented liar," says Hitchens.

But Epstein isn't backing down. Just last week, he sent off another E-mail pointing to a 1994 interview Hitchens did in The Nation with rabid Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Hitchens "uncritically accepts as true" Faurisson's arguments, Epstein writes. He also notes that Hitchens refers to the Holocaust as a "myth."

Hitchens says that he used "myth" ironically and did rebut Faurisson.

Backing him up is Nation publisher Victor Navasky and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. Navasky vouches that "Christopher is not a Holocaust denier."

Meanwhile, Hitchens may be trying to make peace with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal.

Hitchens left his former friend open to perjury charges by telling House prosecutors that Blumenthal once told him Monica Lewinsky was a "stalker."

Last week, Hitchens called the Blumenthal home, according to The Washington Post. Wife Jackie, who also works in the White House, promptly hung up on him. Hitchens won't say what he wanted to tell the couple. But he confesses that "even if they forgive me, I will never forgive myself" for not warning them.

Itemizing

FORMER CONGRESSMAN Bill Paxon looked like he was making a power grab Friday when he bounded out of City Hall and jumped into Mayor Giuliani's green GMC Suburban van. Actually, Paxon just mixed up his GOP muscle cars. He'd meant to get into the blue Suburban of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who'd been meeting with Hizzoner. The red-faced Paxon switched vehicles after someone yelled, "Wrong truck!" a

MAXWELL AND MTV veejay Ananda Lewis showed off their romance at Tommy Hilfiger's party Thursday night at Brown's. Also at the bash were Annabella Sciorra, Lenny Kravitz, Marc Anthony and Stephen Jenkins, who flirted in vain with the very married Andie MacDowell. Later, they all headed downtown to Shine nightclub's one-year anniversary party a

PAUL NEWMAN and Miramax Chairman Harvey Weinstein have ponied up $ 50,000 each to save some open space in their hometown of Westport, Conn. The town needs $ 880,000 more to buy just under an acre across from Sherwood Island for a nature preserve. Meanwhile, Weinstein's wife, Eve, is co-chairing a screening of "A Walk on the Moon" Friday morning to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation Internationala.

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SEN. TED KENNEDY and his wife, Victoria Reggie, celebrate their birthdays this week. He's turning 67. She'll be 45. They plan to have friends over to their new Georgetown digs, skipping their annual costume party a

DONALD O'CONNOR is fighting back from a bad bout of pneumonia. The 73-year-old song-and-dance legend, who has been hospitalized in Palm Springs since Jan. 30, was taken off a ventilator last week. But he'll stay in the hospital for now.

**GRAPHIC:** RICHARD CORKERY DAILY NEWS JEWELRY: Most of the celeb winners of the UN's Time for Peace awards missed the Manhattan Center event on Thursday. Among those who did make it were singer Jewel (above) and model Irina (r.). TROUBLE-MAKERS? Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte in "I Love Trouble." TOMMY GIRL: Tommy Hilfiger and "Just the Ticket" star Andie MacDowell share a laugh backstage at his fashion show at Roseland Thursday.

LOAD-DATE: February 22, 1999

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LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

Copyright 1999 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)

February 22, 1999

SECTION: The Guardian Media Page; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 928 words

HEADLINE: Hitch in hot water,

Christopher Hitchens' battle with the US press has taken a dramatic twist. Now he is accused of Holocaust denial.
Martin Kettle reports

BYLINE: MARTIN KETTLE

BODY:

First, there was the row between Christopher Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal. Now, there is the even bigger row between Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn. And, looming in the wings, there is a row between Christopher Hitchens and Edward J Epstein that could be the biggest of all. Epstein has accused Hitchens of being a Holocaust revisionist, which in the US is about as bad an insult as there is.

When journalists fall out with Hitchens, they certainly do it in numbers, in style and, best of all, in print. Two weeks ago, as the trial of Bill Clinton moved towards its predictable denouement, the Vanity Fair columnist filed an affidavit accusing Blumenthal, a former New Yorker journalist turned Clinton aide, of fingering Monica Lewinsky as a 'stalker', something Blumenthal had denied on oath in videotaped evidence to the impeachment trial.

Reverberations of the expat British journalist's breach of his off-the-record lunch with Blumenthal at Washington's Occidental Grill show no sign of abating two weeks on.

Blumenthal has denied Hitchens's claim and stands by his February 3 testimony. But Blumenthal is not talking on the record at all, seemingly confident that the frenzied talk of possible perjury charges that followed Hitchens's move will not in the end lead to a prosecution.

The Washington Post's media expert Howard Kurtz wrote on Friday that 'a number of legal and media experts say the controversy doesn't amount to much.' The ubiquitous Harvard law guru Alan Dershowitz confirms that conclusion. 'There is no perjury case against Blumenthal,' he says.

Legally, that may be, but the argument about the politics and the journalistic ethics moves still wider.

Leading the continuing assault on Hitchens is the even more veteran left-wing British expat Alexander Cockburn. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece on February 11, Cockburn called Hitchens 'a Judas and a snitch', adding that he 'has always liked to have it both ways' politically, and accused Hitchens of 'measuring himself for martyrdom as the only leftist who can think through the moral consequences of Clintonism'.

Cockburn followed that up in the weekly New York Press last week in a piece headed 'Hitch the Snitch (Continued)'. It charged Hitchens with 'treachery and megalomania', and alleged that in 1996 he had called Bob Dole's campaign HQ to say he had a story that could turn the presidential election around and put the Republican in the White House - that the President's aide Dick Morris was procuring women for Clinton at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington.

Now comes a third Cockburn blast, this time in the leftwing weekly The Nation. Cockburn and Hitchens both write columns for The Nation, in which they have been sniping at one another for weeks.

In last week's Nation Hitchens defended his anti-Blumenthal affidavit. He said that Blumenthal had publicly falsified his

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testimony to Kenneth Starr's grand jury last year and that the White House man had 'suckered' the press into believing his false account. The subsequently published transcripts disproved Blumenthal's version, Hitchens asserted, and had forced him to go public.

In any case, Hitchens wrote, he had already named Blumenthal in an article in the Independent on Sunday last September. So he was 'in a weak position' to refuse the Republican prosecutors when they requested an affidavit from him. (In fact his article simply cited 'a good friend of mine, who sincerely lied for Clinton before a grand jury'.) Cockburn's new assault in the Nation claims that Hitchens was 'suckered' by a false account, given by a Starr spokesman, of Blumenthal's original evidence. 'It's clear Hitchens was citing the grand jury session without having read the transcript,' Cockburn now alleges. The charge that Blumenthal lied 'is false', he says. 'Hitchens, with suspicious ease, was duped by Starr's agitprop'. He has 'mangled facts, traduced his friend and now whines that he, somehow, is the victim.' Contacted in California, Hitchens hit back: 'It's a long time since I've cared about anything Alexander Cockburn writes. I used to admire his writing very much, but he seems to spend most of his time attacking his Nation colleagues.'

Yet if there were any room for doubt that it is now open season on Hitchens in the American press - most of whom seem dumbfounded that Hitchens would name an off-the-record source in his affidavit - then consider a much uglier new allegation against the British writer.

In 1995, the writer Edward J Epstein told a number of media organisations last week, he and Hitchens had dinner after the New Yorker's 70th anniversary party. At the dinner, according to Epstein, Hitchens told him that there was no evidence of the existence of *Holocaust* death camps and that he was sceptical about claims that the Nazis killed six million Jews. Epstein said that Hitchens's remarks were so disturbing that he noted them in his diary that night.

Asked whether Epstein's allegations are true, Hitchens responded: 'I am content to place my reputation in the safe keeping of those who know me.' Both Epstein and the White House deny that this latest allegation is part of any coordinated campaign to discredit Blumenthal's accuser.

Cockburn claims that Hitchens is driven by 'insensate lust for the limelight'. If so, he would not be the only journalist in Washington against whom that charge could ever have been made. Right now, though, Hitchens has got himself the kind of attention that no journalist in his right mind would envy.

LOAD-DATE: February 22, 1999

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"The Flat Hat"

Opinions

Letters about Kissinger

**Editor's Note:** Letters to the Editor and letters about Kissinger have been edited for length this week due to the high volume and space restrictions. All submissions were cut to the current two-page limitation (Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced). Thank you.

Call for apology of President Sullivan to Hitchens

Open Letter to President Timothy Sullivan:

We did not have the pleasure of being introduced Feb. 8, which left me in the position of hearing
your short presentation while delivering my own somewhat longer one in your absence. This
inequality, however, was partly at my expense since just before your departure, you publicly
called me a liar and then hastily withdrew.

I am writing to you now in order to renew the challenge that I made to you as you made ready to
scuttle from the room. Either make good on what you said, or have the decency to apologize.

For the sake of leniency, I will accept as a "lie" any misstatement of fact or any historical error in
my Harper's essay.

I do not see any third course of action open to you. I was a guest on your campus; I am a fellow
teacher (though I cannot claim any acquaintance with your own scholarship or any acquaintance
with anyone who claims familiarity with it), and you insulted me upon my arrival, in front of a large
audience made up of your own students and faculty.

When asked to materialize your very grave accusation, you first refused and then turned tail. You looked a fool all right -- I wish you could have heard what was said of you after your retreat -- but that won't suffice since you looked something of a fool to begin with.

I think that you have to accept the responsibility here, since you have chosen to associate your
ancient seat of learning with a very questionable public figure and have chosen to do so without
consulting your faculty or your student body in advance. They therefore had no choice but to
invite guests who could state the contrary view.

You -- who briefly favored the meeting with your condescending permission to discuss all matters
under the rubric of civility -- did not live up even for one minute to the standard you invoked.

As a guest and visitor I can only warn you of the harm that will come to the reputation of your
college as the reputation of your new chancellor becomes better understood. That could have
remained a matter of deep, but polite, disagreement between us. (After all, I approached
Kissinger well in advance of publication, soliciting his reply to the very serious accusations I made
against him, and we have dueled in the pages of the New York Times.)

However, I shall not be saying, as I lecture on various campuses or talk to my own academic
colleagues at the New School in New York, that the president of William and Mary has deluded
opinions about Henry Kissinger. That would be too flattering. I shall have to say that the president
of William and Mary keeps his opinions about recent history to himself, while reserving the right to
abuse visiting speakers and then to excuse himself in a hurry.

I don't wish to sound too easily offended; I enjoy polemics and debates (which of course take two

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sides). The courtesy and consideration of your students and faculty, shown to me repeatedly after that event, were more than enough, and I wish you could have heard them, too, as a lesson in elementary good manners.

The honor of your school, in other words, has been vindicated in spite of you. However, I have to be inflexible on the main point. You publicly called me a liar, and I now insist again that, as a scholar and a host and a gentleman, you either provide evidence for the assertion or find the grace to withdraw it.

If you choose, I shall treat your response as confidential. This letter, however, is being offered in public, as was your original slander.

-- Christopher Hitchens

## In our president's defense

### Open Statement to Hitchens' Letter:

President Sullivan has designated me as his second in this affaire d'honneur, and I pledge my untiring efforts to avoid a deadly trip to Dueling Oak. Beneath Hitchens' windy bluster and overblown rhetoric, it seems odd for him -- the author of a book about Mother Teresa called "Missionary Position" -- to claim slander. But as we have learned, Hitchens will go to any length to sell a magazine or hawk a book. We do not propose to aid him in these mercenary tasks, but to let him slink back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. This is reason: let him make the most of it.

-- William T. Walker,
Director of University Relations

## Supporting Kissinger

### To the Editor:

I am writing to express my disagreement with the letters arguing that Henry Kissinger be removed as chancellor of the College. I would like to make it clear that not all students feel Kissinger is a misguided appointment or that the chancellor selection process should necessarily be something the student body participates in.

I fully support the Board of Visitors' decision to appoint Kissinger as our chancellor and would be honored to hear him speak about foreign policy issues on any occasion.

-- Tim Miller,
Class of '03

## Loud voices don't necessarily make infallible argument

### To the Editor:

It is a common misconception in this country, especially on college campuses, that those who yell the loudest are more important than those who do not. This is not true. As a conservative college student, I realize that many may believe me to be in the minority in this.

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3.

This is because I do not seek to drown out those of different opinions with borrowed rhetoric and loud protests. However, faced with recent events at the College, I feel that a more direct approach to the continued campaign of harassment and discrimination against College conservatives is warranted.

I refer primarily to the teach-in recently staged on campus. This event amounted to little more than a left-wing extremist rally and smear-session against Dr. Henry Kissinger, and I write to express my strongest and most vehement objections to it.

I support our chancellor. I also support our college President Timothy Sullivan. The presentation given by George Herring and Christopher Hitchens was disgraceful and represented slanted, left-wing revisionism at its most seamy.

Hitchens was arrogant, self-righteous, haughty and offensive. He presented an argument based upon dubious grounds that sought to discredit a man of great integrity and forthrightness, a man who served his country honorably in a very difficult period of American history.

Throughout, both Hitchens and Herring used such terms as "one can presume," "it has been suggested" and "it is possible," but presented little concrete evidence that could be taken as convincing proof of anything relating to the serious allegations they made.

Increasingly, left-wing groups on campus, as in the nation at large, have been presuming to speak for "the people." I don't know which people they mean to speak for with their riotous behavior, patronizing words and sanctimonious "demonstrations," but they certainly do not speak for me. I object to the presumption that their opinions are more important than anyone else's simply because of the volume of their voices.

I also object to their attempts to remove an honorable and decent man from a well-deserved position of respect as the chancellor of our college. They claim that the fact that he is a controversial figure makes him ineligible for the chancellorship. Perhaps they are not aware of the irony of that position.

Perhaps, also, they do not recognize the strong responses they invite by associating themselves with Hitchens, a revisionist who, among other things, denies the Holocaust and sneers at such selfless and beloved individuals as Mother Teresa. These left-wing extremist elements may claim that I speak out of fear of Hitchens' message, but the fact of the matter is that I need not fear what is not true.

It is a sad sign of our times that these liberal elements of our community feel the need to invent crises where none exist. It is unfortunate also that they feel it necessary to perform these acts in the name of a vast, faceless "movement." Although this "movement" claims to be working towards some amorphous greater good, I frankly cannot see it, and I cannot imagine it being furthered by the slander of a respectable American.

It saddens me that this obvious left-wing political agenda has been so easily mistaken for legitimate fact, and that a minority on this campus -- and it is a minority -- is so convinced of its own infallibility that it presumes to speak for the entire community. This is unacceptable.

I do not accept the unjust and unprovoked vilification of Kissinger, and I do not support the misguided attempts to remove him from the chancellorship. Moreover, self-assured, pious "demands" on my behalf are not welcome.

I will not be silent while liberal extremists presume to speak for me and for others like me. No, thank you; such left-wing revisionist claptrap is not the truth, no matter how loud you yell it. No, thank you.

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-- Matthew P. Cairo,
Class of '02

Finding pride in protest

To the Editor:

As I sat and watched the protest that ensued this past Saturday during the Charter Day
ceremony, I was unexpectedly overcome with emotion. I was not fearful, embarrassed or
enraged, but rather filled with amazement and admiration. To me the scene was something so
beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes.

I arrived at the ceremony with a neutral perception of Dr. Henry Kissinger. I went to hear him speak merely out of curiosity. I can't say that I was glad to be witness to his public assailment, yet I found the incident represent the true essence of everything that is good about the United States of America.

Public protest is something that happens all the time in this country whether it be fighting for a
cause, signing a petition, writing letters, contacting our government official or even writing articles
challenging someone or something. We forget that many citizens of other countries view this
right, this guarantee of the freedom of speech, as a luxury. To many, the decision to protest is
often a decision that could jeopardize or even end their life.

In the United States, we are allowed to protest the election of our president without it resulting in a civil war. We can criticize his actions, call him stupid and have it broadcast by the media. As we grow up, we are taught to fight for what we believe. If we dislike the status quo, it is ingrained in us that we have the power to change it. All too often, it is easy to lose sight of the rarity and beauty of this freedom.

When President Sullivan introduced Kissinger, a group of students arcose chanting "Not our
chancellor," and I was proud. I was proud that those students felt so passionate about a cause
that they decided to act, and I was even more in awe that our country ensures our right to protest.
The fact that the situation was resolved peacefully speaks volumes as well.

When the president said that most of the people there wanted to hear what Kissinger had to say,
everyone else in the Hall stood and clapped, the protesters left, having made their presence
known, and the majority ruled ... no blood, no tear gas, no brutality. The anti-Kissinger group was
still allowed to voice their protests outside and was even broadcast on the evening news.

Whether or not you like Kissinger seems irrelevant to me. What I saw this past weekend allowed
me to witness first-hand the ideals upon which our country was founded. Certainly, the United
States has many problems. Our election process is obviously very flawed in light of recent events;
however, at least we have an election process rather than a leader usurping his power by force.

We can say what we think; we are free to believe what we choose to believe; we can act on these
convictions without fear of repercussions. For this, I love our country and I thank the protesters
and everyone else in attendance last Saturday for reaffirming this.

-- Shanley Pinchotti,
Class of '01

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5.

Sullivan's definition of "real" student questionable

To the Editor:

I would like to respond to a comment made by President Timothy Sullivan on Charter Day. After the protesters voluntarily left the ceremony, Sullivan mentioned that the remaining members of the audience were the "real William and Mary."

Are people who call attention to issues and actually exhibit passion for something not the "real William and Mary?" If so, that is highly unfortunate. We apparently attend the best small public university in the country, but Sullivan seems to imply that going against the norm is taboo, or that even thinking for oneself should be condemned.

Who is the "real William and Mary"? Are they the people who feel threatened by activism and therefore malign the actions of those who oppose Kissinger? Are they the people who live in a colonial bubble, refusing to recognize there is life beyond the 'Burg? Is the "real William and Mary" a club consisting of people who all think alike? I am extremely disappointed that ignorant and conservative people feel threatened by others who think differently and act passionately.

If the "real William and Mary" are the people who booed and clapped wildly as the protesters left the Hall, this is not a community of which I would like to be a part. I am proud of all those who walked out of Charter Day because they stood up for what they believe. I consider them to be the "real William and Mary" because they are using their education to expand the mind, not limit it.

-- Molly Bloom,
Class of '01

Alumni approve activism

To the Editor:

It warms our hearts to find that student activism still lives at our alma mater.

-- Kathy Baldwin,
Tom Cooney,
Jerry Coyne,
Michele Donithan,
Jane Ball Entwisle,
Tim Groves,
Betsy McAllster Groves,
John Hempel,
Bruce Hockman,
Cathy Bryan Johnson,
M. Greyson Pannill,
Richard Phillips,
Janice Toone Russell,
William H. Sizemore Jr.,
Larry D. Smith,
Skip Stiles,
Ken Valz,
Class of '71

JUL-30-2001 11:41

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6.

Intolerance towards minority opinion in recent Kissinger controversy deserves rebuke

To the Editor:

This past week, I attended both the teach-in about Kissinger and the Charter Day ceremony. What struck me the most about the present controversy on campus is not the audacity of the protesters, nor the shaky reputation of our new chancellor, but rather the shocking intolerance with which the College and the City of Williamsburg treated an opinion that was clearly in the minority.

The first evidence of this intolerance that I witnessed was at the teach-in. President Sullivan asked the organizers of the event to speak and then proceeded to insult their guest. His speech began quietly and decently, but to proclaim that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that we should respect all interpretations and then to promptly criticize someone's beliefs and work without defending his attack is not only inconsistent, it is also inordinately rude.

I also read an article ("Anti-Kissinger Author to Appear at William and Mary," WAVY TV online) that quoted Sullivan saying, "The opinions of those undertaking this [protest] are flat-out wrong. I have a right to my opinion, and they have a right to theirs. I'm happy for them to entertain foolish ideas if they want." One might as well just say "You can have your own political opinion, but don't expect to be able to express it unless it agrees with mine." His wife also reportedly called the protesters "dummies" to their faces. This is not the mature behavior of those in administrative and representative positions.

Sullivan's and other people's comportment at the ceremony was what drove me to write this letter. At the ceremony, not only did Sullivan insinuate that the protesters were not acting like "ladies and gentlemen," but he also declared that the demonstrators "were not William and Mary." This was directed towards actual tuition-paying students. This, coming from the president of a school that is currently striving for a higher level of diversity.

These comments were almost directly followed by Sullivan's speech, which bemoaned our generation's lack of political participation and called for the College to teach more democratic values and to install a willingness to challenge conventionality! It was a bit hard for me to swallow after he had antagonistically mocked, condescended and set the crowd against a group whose opinion happened to differ from his.

The president's response is not the only one that deserves rebuke. Protesters were spat upon, threatened violently, slapped and called "communists." A friend of mine was chanting during the ceremony, and a College employee wearing an "Event Coordinator" pin turned around and threatened her, yelling in a thick Southern accent, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to knock you down!" Her employment here marks her as a representative of the College, and that sort of behavior is hardly professional.

In conclusion, I would like to add that I am not an incendiary. I hate confrontation and don't have an innate desire to mistrust all authority figures. I am merely a student of literature, and I will readily admit that I don't even begin to understand the complexity of the period during which Kissinger held office. I do not believe in the black and white and the absolute right and wrong of situations. I do believe that the manner in which the administrators and body of the College reacted to controversy is intolerant and disrespectful. A responsible amount of respect is due to all people, despite their opinions. That is not only an opinion that "is William and Mary," but is also universal.

-- Anna-Claire Fourness,
Class of '02

JUL-30-2001 11:42

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Arrogance and self-righteousness overshadow respect College traditions deserve

Open Letter to Chancellor Henry Kissinger:

My parents fled Chile in 1972, shortly after democratically elected president Salvador Allende took office. Chile was in great uncertainty. Allende came to power and, almost immediately, changed a free market society into a socialist state. His government brought support from Moscow to help with the transformation of Chile. He came into power through the consent of the people, but he didn't execute the will of the people.

My parents arrived in Nicaragua in November 1972. They closely monitored the deteriorating situation in Chile. They feared their homeland would become a second Cuba, a means to bring communism further into the new world. When General Pinochet overthrew the government in 1974, they were relieved because they knew problems would be solved.

They had seen first-hand that the will of the people was no longer respected under Allende. Pinochet simply exercised force where a government no longer existed because it had ignored and contradicted its very source of power. Perhaps Pinochet abused his power, but it was after the fact, and for that he will answer.

My parents have lived in America for more than 27 years. I have come to appreciate all the wonderful opportunities this country has to offer. I was blessed to be able to grow up here with all the rights and freedoms and responsibilities it offers. Today, I also enjoy returning to a prospering Chile.

I have no regrets that I could not grow up in Chile because I know I would not be the person I am today without the experiences I have had here. I still know, however, that I can enjoy the cultural heritage of the United States and of Chile, and that can only make me a richer person.

I want to apologize for my fellow students' actions this past weekend. Their passion got the better of them and perhaps they forgot for a moment the atmosphere of tolerance and respect we foster for one another at the College. Sometimes our differences generate great anger, but as educated men and women, we have to learn to channel that anger in the right place.

President Sullivan worried that our generation shows indifference and apathy when it comes to politics. But this weekend, I saw something that concerns me even more: an air of arrogance and self-righteousness that closes dialogue and minds to differences of opinion. This college has traditions, which many respect and esteem.

It is sad when a few individuals say that their opinions are valued more than the greater respect for the community. It is sad when the minority imposes their will upon the majority, when they don't have the authority to do so. I know what it is like to be in the minority, and I know what it is like to protest.

We must work to change hearts and minds through civilized and peaceful means, respectful of traditions and institutions. The protesters held a passionate, but very open, intellectual discussion about your role in Vietnam the Thursday before Charter Day. Such a gathering is William and Mary.

I close by asking you to keep watch over our college. What worries me is the anger and passion involved. I admire their zeal, but I wonder if they have abandoned dialogue too soon and are not merely becoming a polarizing force in our society. It is all too easy to call attention to yourself. It is all too easy to yell. It is all too easy to divide.

But the discord this division causes is destructive and deceptive. It is destructive because a few can hurt the community, deceptive because it does not put forward a cause but more a group of people, who wish to be heard and seen. Someday, this passion may be put to good use.

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[LC]

8.

Hopefully, as Sullivan said, this college will train future leaders. Thank you for being patient with our growing pains.

Please come back soon!

-- Mattias A. Caro,
Class of '02

## Showing respect to both sides of argument

**To the Editor:**

Over the past few weeks I've become greatly disturbed by the actions of members of our college community -- including President Sullivan, the administration and the student body. I feel that Charter Day was a culmination of the frustrations that we all share, but I don't believe that we would have these frustrations if we could relearn the principles of freedom and respect that our country is based on.

I believe that President Sullivan failed to give students the proper forum for their concerns regarding the position of chancellor and, in doing so, did not give the students the proper respect they deserve, which caused the students' reaction at Charter Day. On the other hand, I also believe that the students have failed to give respect to the traditions of Charter Day and to the participants and observers of the event. I'm not accusing anyone, nor am I condoning anything that people have done.

Frankly, I'm disappointed in many of the actions of individuals and feel that they have shown disrespect for each other. I believe that we owe it to ourselves as representatives of the College to do better. Allow me to explain.

It's always the same debate. When an individual erring on the right side of the political spectrum is presented, those on the left protest greatly. Likewise, when an individual has beliefs that are more leftist, those on the right cry out in horror. I'm not saying that one side is better than the other; in fact, both sides have their own problems.

Here is one thing that I do know. I believe that all people, no matter what side they are on, have the right to speak their mind and be treated with respect while doing so. What I mean by respect is not reverence or even trust, but treating people like the human beings they are because while we may not condone what they are saying or what they represent, we have the chance to voice our own opinions. That is what this whole country is about. Everyone has the freedom of speech and assembly. But for this right to be sustained, we cannot silence those whom we do not agree with.

This does not mean that we just have to take everything lying down. Not in the least. If we feel someone is the vehicle for beliefs that we feel are dangerous, we must act, especially if that person affects our lives. Voice your own opinions; lead petitions, protests, whatever you think will get attention. Rally outside the location of their speech if you want to get heard. Do what you need to do to be understood and taken seriously.

But please know that, in order for us to have these rights, all others must have these exact same rights. We can learn much from those with whom we do not agree. If we don't want to listen to what they have to say, that's fine, and it's our own choice. No one is forcing us to listen.

But if we are listening and learning, I believe that we should extend to all people the same respect that we would like. We don't all have to agree, and we must fight against what we think is wrong.

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We have to make the most effective fight possible, and I believe that such a fight includes mutual
respect between both parties, even if they both despise one another.

Maybe I'm a bit idealistic, but I think that what I've just written is what should be done. Everyone
should have the chance to say what they feel. I know it is uncomfortable to let everyone speak,
but I think it is necessary so that we get that chance to be heard. It is one of the prices we pay for
our freedoms.

I hope that everyone on this campus can learn something from this statement. I don't believe that anyone is innocent. I'm not saying that Dr. Henry Kissinger should or should not be our chancellor. That's a whole different debate. What I am saying is this: President Sullivan, the administration and the student body have all mishandled the situation and refused to listen to the other sides involved.

A little more compromise and listening would have resulted in a very different ending to this story. All I ask is that you think about what I've said and see how it relates to your life. Take some time out to listen and to learn. I assure you that the result will be positive.

-- Lara Ponomareff,
Class of '01

Standing up for beliefs, representing College

To the Editor:

I went to Charter Day and clapped hard for Adolphus Hailstork. Then I protested the installation of Henry Kissinger as our chancellor. Now, according to our president, I do not represent the College.

Why did I do it? Why did I stand up? It's hard to say. I was conflicted. I stayed up until 3 a.m. the
night before Charter Day talking it over with my roommate. And during the ceremony, my heart
was pounding hard. When I saw Kissinger shuffle out wearing my school's robe and regalia,
though, I had to do it. I couldn't accept this man as my college's representative to the world. Yes,
it was rude, but I considered it a small price to pay for speaking out.

I am William and Mary. I tutor kids, check out your books at the library and play for the orchestra. I go to Richmond to talk to a House of Delegates subcommittee about a living wage and I work against the death penalty. And because the College has helped build this conscience in me, I can take into account many sides of an argument and still assign moral responsibility.

Most importantly, though, I stand up for what I believe in: however you interpret his responsibility
in foreign affairs, Mr. Kissinger remains tainted with the blood of Cambodian civilians and Chilean
activists. This is not debatable; his association with the administration that extended the Vietnam
War (temporally and spatially) and helped overthrow Salvador Allende is historical fact.

I like this school too much to see him sully our reputation as much as he has tarnished our government's. I stood up for the College just as much as I did for peace and justice, and I've never been prouder to attend this college. I'm sorry that our president feels differently.

Hark the students' voices swelling, strong and true and clear; Alma Mater's love they're telling, ringing far and near ...

-- Matt Schroeder,
Class of '02

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[L.C.]

10.

# Administration unresponsive to students', faculty's input in selecting chancellor

## To the Editor:

In an attempt to create dialogue between the administration and students, individuals of all ages met Feb. 8 to discuss whether Henry Kissinger should be the College's 22nd chancellor. President Timothy Sullivan opened the teach-in with the observation that "the worst thing about it [the Vietnam era] was that mostly we shouted at each other. We would not listen; we would not believe that those who had convictions different from our own held those convictions honorably."

Yet history repeats itself. On Feb. 10, as Kissinger prepared to address the College for the first time as chancellor, black-robed seniors stood and split the silence with cries of "Not our chancellor!" And when the utilitarian argument that most wanted to hear Kissinger's speech failed to quell the protesters, Sullivan declared to the applauding, gray-haired audience, "That's not William and Mary; you are."

The breakdown of decorum on Charter Day results as much from the administration's failure to consider student opinion as it does from the disruptive tactics of the protesters themselves. Because the privilege of selecting a chancellor belongs to the Board of Visitors, a politically conservative body appointed by the governor of Virginia, neither students nor faculty have any say in choosing who represents them at the international level.

Few would disagree that Kissinger was a formidable Secretary of State under Nixon. Yet those who object to his role in prolonging the Vietnam War, obstructing democracy in Chile and aiding human rights violations in Cambodia, East Timor and Indonesia have had no forum in which to voice their dissent.

Their outrage is justified by the fact that the College is not a state school, but a state-sanctioned school. It receives only one-fifth of its budget directly from the state, while 40 percent of its undergraduate population, shouldering more than half of the tuition burden, hails from out-of-state. The choice of chancellor should be less beholden to political interests at the state level and more reflective of the College community's desires.

Disappointingly, however, the administration has remained unresponsive to the idea that students whose beliefs differ from its own "[hold] those convictions honorably." During his short speech at the Feb. 8 teach-in, Sullivan praised those in attendance for actively pursuing "a free mind and free speech" in the finest tradition of William and Mary. Yet when those same students exercised their free speech two days later, Sullivan claimed that the soon-to-be graduates were not, in fact, William and Mary. He deliberately alienated one part of the student body from the rest on behalf of its minority viewpoint.

Sullivan's remarks following Kissinger's address underscored the need for courage at high levels of leadership, yet moral courage begins by speaking out against injustice at all levels. If the College is to rank among the world's greatest institutions by 2010, as Sullivan optimistically projects, we, the College community, must be able to exercise our opinions and voice our dissent before it's too late for action. Henry Kissinger may be our chancellor, but we are William and Mary.

-- Sarah Mi Ra Dougherty,
Class of '02

JUL-30-2001 11:43

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Protest good example of student spirit

To the Editor:

On Charter Day, President Timothy Sullivan presented Henry Kissinger to College students and the public at large as a model citizen who consistently put moral principle over transient political expediency. As much as I respect President Sullivan I must say that this seems to me a profoundly mistaken moral judgment.

I, at least, know of no reasonably impartial observers who praise Kissinger for consistently allowing principle to obstruct his quest for personal political advancement. What he has consistently practiced is the morally dubious policy of Realpolitik to the detriment to the basic human rights and the very lives of others, including thousands of Southeast Asian non-combatants and innocent people elsewhere in the world.

His defenders often remind us that he received the Noble Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Vietnam War, as though this fact alone established his commitment to democratic values. His North Vietnamese counterpart, however, was offered the same prize on the same grounds. Were he available, would the Board of Visitors, President Sullivan or anyone else be prepared to name Le Duc Tho as chancellor? If receiving the Peace Prize doesn't prove Kissinger worthy of that office, neither, I submit, does anything else in his career.

Of those who question this judgment, I can only ask that you review Kissinger's actions during the Nixon years and ask yourselves whether, in all honesty, you want the next generation to adopt the political values that guided his conduct (which is a different question, incidentally, from the legal one of whether Mr. Kissinger committed war crimes). As for myself, I agree with the conclusion drawn by the students who protested Kissinger's installment as chancellor.

If some of these protesters risked angering many by briefly disrupting the Charter Day ceremonies, it was because they felt it imperative publicly and dramatically to express opposition to a perceived grave wrong. Their offense against College traditions was trifling compared to the offense against human rights ideals that the Board of Visitors committed by naming Kissinger chancellor. They are indeed "real William and Mary students" and the College is fortunate to have them.

-- Mark Fowler,
Professor of philosophy

Individual interpretation of history subject to personal moral standards of 'experts'

To the Editor:

Imagine this: on Feb. 8, two of your friends attend the teach-in about Henry Kissinger. Afterwards, you ask them what happened. This is one story:

"It all started when President Sullivan spoke in defense of Kissinger. He called Christopher Hitchens' Harper's article 'a disgrace ... an issue of inaccurate research, of half truths...' He was right. Hitchens interrupted him mid-sentence. Unfortunately, Sullivan had to leave for a Board of Visitors meeting before he could go through the article line by line. But he did the right thing, refusing to allow these charges to go unanswered."

This is what the other has to say:

"It started when President Sullivan stood up to try to defend the indefensible. He couldn't back up any of his claims about the Harper's article. He called it 'a disgrace ... an issue of inaccurate

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research, of half-truths' but couldn't support any of these accusations. Instead he ran out, claiming he had to attend an important meeting. His name-calling, and especially his leaving before Hitchens could respond, is inexcusable!

This example illustrates an interesting principle: history is fundamentally interpretative. Historians must make sense of complicated events and fashion the hodge-podge of everyday life into a coherent story. In doing so, they make judgments about which events and people matter, which don't and what it all means as a whole. Since historians play fundamental roles in the story they craft, credibility becomes an issue. Before we take any historian's word as truth, it's important to understand where he's "coming from." In the recent debate surrounding Kissinger, there is an actor to whom we have not paid adequate attention: Christopher Hitchens, whose article in Harper's Magazine re-ignited the debate over Kissinger's rightful place in history.

Hitchens is a colorful character. He has built a career on his willingness to question the most sacred of sacred cows in our society. Sometimes this instinct has led him to do things that were admirable, even if they were controversial. But other times, he has misdirected his cynical questioning of our popular icons, with some odd results.

Hitchens' instincts are far from infallible. His cynicism seems to cloud his judgment about a subject's character. His book "Missionary Position" about Mother Teresa comes to mind. In it, he writes, "Her kingdom was of this world and of the nastiest bits of it, and the net effect of her career was to enormously impoverish the poor."

He examined records of the Missionaries of Charity, discovering that there were "unsavory" names on her donor list. Hitchens suspects the worst -- that Mother Teresa was complicit in the crimes of her contributors. This ignores the possibility that Mother Teresa's sin may have been inattention to names on checks she received. Hitchens fails to see that Mother Teresa's good character and pure motives refute his theory.

What does this mean for the Kissinger controversy? Hitchens' background gives shape and size to the "grain of salt" with which one should take any historical writing. Hitchens is a cynic with a flair for the controversial. He'll ask tough questions. In answering, he'll take a dim view of human nature and intentions. Sometimes cynicism is warranted. Other times (such as with Mother Teresa), it's unlikely that he's justified.

Occasionally, as with Kissinger's case, it's hard to know who's right and who's wrong. One thing is clear: in Kissinger's case, where the historian must decide if his acts were human errors or criminal acts, Hitchens' personality inclines him to believe the worst.

So, as we evaluate Hitchens's article, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger," our best bet is to take the questions Hitchens raises, and run with them. He may introduce some new and important avenues of inquiry, but we should be wary of his own answers.

-- Joseph Sternberg,
Class of '04

## Unprofessional behavior towards student

### To the Editor:

The following events should be listed in the police reports under assault. A guest speaker, one personally invited to the College campus, verbally attacked a student. At the teach-in, Christopher Hitchens, delivered a speech against Henry Kissinger.

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Hitchens set the mood for the teach-in by interrupting President Sullivan's opening comments. Sullivan expressed his belief in the freedom of speech, although he felt Hitchens' writing was made up of "half-truths and lies." Hitchens attacked him for his opinions. This behavior continued throughout the evening with comments like "I don't know why people insist on calling Kissinger a doctor just because he has a Ph.D."

While soaking up the praise of a select group of students, Hitchens dodged committing to concrete answers to several questions. Hitchens gave vague and rambling answers, certain that none would call him on it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a young man pointed out that a definitive answer to a particular question was never given.

An audience member, a Holocaust survivor, claimed he had read that Hitchens stated that the Holocaust never occurred. The man said he also read that Hitchens denied making this statement, using the defense that his mother was Jewish. Finally, the audience member cited examples of anti-Semitic officials of Jewish descent, showing the defense to be feeble. He asked, "So, did you claim the Holocaust didn't happen?"

Hitchens repeated the question clearly enough, with minor alterations. Sadly, his answer contained little clarity. Just five minutes later, the audience learned that Hitchens' mother, wife and daughter are Jewish. They also heard that the Holocaust statement came from people "given to lying" and an "old enemy, who is a psychopathic liar."

Another audience member asked, "Yes or no?" Hitchens ignored him. A freshman, Aaron Oetting, repeated the question louder, "Please, yes or no?" Not only did Hitchens refuse to answer, but he took out his anger on the student, calling him "Ducky."

Hitchens continued his rude behavior by specifically directing his statement about "cheap and dirty" people in politics at Oetting. However, Hitchens crossed the line at the end of the "teach-in." As the audience left Washington 201, Hitchens strode over to Oetting, shoved his finger in the student's face and yelled, "Fuck you, fuck you. I will remember you the next time I'm here." Yes, this happened. There are witnesses. I am one.

As per Hitchens' invitation to speak to him after the talk, students followed him out to the steps. Hitchens continued his snide remarks, claiming Oetting did not have the intellect to debate him about the Holocaust. Obviously, Hitchens considers a yes or no answer a controversial debate.

Fellow students, I hope you are outraged. He knew he was speaking to a crowd largely unknowledgeable about matters of Vietnam politics. Hitchens relied on this, spouting facts unrelated to the question at hand, yet acting as though he had answered effectively. However, more than one person recognized this tactic. One even asked for a definitive answer, a reasonable expectation of a speaker willing to stand up and announce his views.

Hitchens' attempts to incite anger against Kissinger relied on his own brand of propaganda. Rather than becoming anti-Kissinger, I left the meeting anti-Hitchens. A man who feels justified in yelling obscenities at a student is not a man at all. The students who so enthusiastically applauded Hitchens must not have been listening to his speech. Christopher Hitchens is not a hero.

And by the way, Mr. Hitchens, a Ph.D. does make one a doctor.

-- Megan Mize,
Class of '04

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# Autocratic demi-gods rule students' lives

## To the Editor:

This college, supposedly founded upon the best ideals and graced by the noble and true characters of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, seems willing to throw this hard-earned tradition away for profit and ease.

How truly great is a body claiming the highest of values but being directed by the whims of an untouchable autocratic group of demi-gods? And under the auspices of democracy, as the blinds on the eyes dissolve, the screaming injustice is heard deafeningly loud, and the true nature of the College is known.

If only we had Washington and Jefferson back. If only money and needless politics of a select, non-elected few behind tightly closed and locked doors did not steer the course of this ostensibly valorous and self-guided university.

The outrage is there to be known. And now I know. It troubles me deeply, and I could merely feign to understand how the thieves of justice sleep at night and manage to live their dirty lives without being crushed by the infinite gravity of their morbid trespasses.

I am grateful not to be one. Can a conscience successfully be manipulated out of existence, silenced and coaxed by money and power? Ask the Board of Visitors. Ask Henry Kissinger. Ask the people at this college who know in their twinkling inner brain that they are little more than cogs in a machine of self-interested misuse.

But when you inform the bright-eyed neophyte, do not do so as a "realist" describing the inevitable, but as a fellow hopeful that the ideals of this college can fill more than empty speeches and letterhead. And let your conscience be on the outside and not imprisoned in a dishonest lair of vagabonds.

-- Colin Doyle,
Class of '01

## New chancellor needs to focus attention back on students, not concentrate on protesters

## To the Editor:

I have never been as proud to be a student at the College as I was Feb. 10. I knew protesters were going to disrupt the Charter Day ceremony and that they were going to try to prevent Kissinger from speaking.

Although I think that he is a crook, liar, thug, bad politician, worse political theorist and his morals and moral intention are dubious, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted him to tell the students why he is and should be the chancellor of our college, and what his vision and hopes for the future are.

When protesters stood up and disrupted the ceremony and the crowd stood up, I found myself on my feet. Was it for Chile, Indochina, my college, my president or the right of the new chancellor to speak? It was for all. As the protesters were shouting, I looked at Kissinger and saw the face of a man who was used to this kind of treatment.

His speech offended me. It offended the entire audience, but I imagine they do not realize that. His speech was a defense! Did he think the audience wanted him to vindicate himself for what he did when he ruled this country? The audacity. A lot of what he said was true, but it somehow lost

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its meaning and truth when it came from his lips.

Here is a point that I think we have lost in this entire discussion about the legitimacy of the new chancellor: the entire point of higher education is to educate the student. This college exists for the students. Yet why did the chancellor never talk about us? Why did he not lay out his vision for our future?

For those who object to the "case against Henry Kissinger," let me remind you that history consists of the good and the bad, the black and the white; all exists in one story of one man.

There is no separating the Middle East from Indochina, and this is not about adding up pros and cons. Even if you don't object to his actions, you must wake up to the corruption around you, that, if it doesn't make you upset, makes you an accomplice.

I was proud Feb. 10 when my friends, my sometimes-ideological opposition and my fellow students decided that they were not going to collude in the actions of the Board of Visitors or of Kissinger himself. They stood up and yelled because they love this school so much.

BOV practices need to be reformed. Their meetings need to be transparent, the minutes available to all and decisions like the election of chancellor need to involve the students. I won't allow political appointees to decide who represents me without my consent. The choice is not as important as the process by which one is chosen.

On Friday, a friend of mine mentioned to a member of the administration that the selection process was the root of the problem. This person replied, "that will never change." I am sure my friend heard wrong.

How dare one think that things will not or cannot be changed. Did Thomas Jefferson ever think that blacks would come to this school? Did John Tyler imagine women would? We cannot simultaneously glorify our past, reify our future and think things do not change.

At that moment in the Hall, we were allowed to actualize together and realize that this place exists for us. We did not forget where we were, we just realized how much we loved it and could not bear to see it damaged or bloodied.

Here is a piece of advice to all: do not ever tell a black person that things cannot be changed. Do not ever tell homosexuals that things will always be the same. Do not tell women to be silent, and never ask for convenience or appropriateness. Please, do not look at the globe and say, "what is it for?" when so much of this world is mute.

Mr. Kissinger, you are not my chancellor. You are not my chancellor because you were not selected in a process by which I could voice my opinion on the matter. Give me a humble man before a rich one, an honest woman before a liar, but do not give me a criminal and ask me to be polite about it.

How dare we not internalize and externalize history. Without that, we can have no tradition.

-- James Long,
Class of '03

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Part #155918S • Rev. 12/00

New

W. MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

227 RIDGEVIEW ROAD
PRINCETON, N.J. 08540
(609) 497-7676

July 16, 2001

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates, Inc.
350 Park Avenue, 26th floor
New York, NY 10022

Dear Henry:

I have just returned from a prolonged trip to Berlin and China. The final preparations for the Museum opening are in high gear. It will be a major German event with an extraordinary guest list. The President, Chancellor, former Presidents, virtually the entire Cabinet (Fischer, Eichel, Scharping, Schily et al), all the major party leaders, and a distinguished international contingent from the U.S., Israel and other European countries will be there. Quite possibly, even the very interesting Mayor of Shanghai, Xu Kuangdi, will come!

I have heard rumors that you are considering *not* coming. Hopefully that's not true. Your absence would raise eyebrows. You are, after all, the most distinguished American expected and in an important sense the idea of the Museum is exactly about 'names' like you, and your family ancestry. Moreover, there will inevitably be some publicity about that ridiculous book about you. Actually I just read a very good refutation of its major allegations in the Berliner Zeitung. If you didn't show, there might be a suspicion that you are ducking. Quite the contrary, being there would give you a chance to show and say what you think of baseless attacks such as this.

There are a number of other matters I would like to discuss with you. It's been too long since we have spoken. I will now be here until about August 20th. When can we have lunch?

I hope you are well. Let me hear from you.

Best regards to Nancy.

Yours,

07/16/2001 15:42

605497/1888

BLUMENTHAL

PAGE 82

New

W. MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

July 16, 2001

Dear Henry:

Here's the Berliner Zeitung article. It's a very good piece. Let me have the clippings from
the Economist and the British press.

When we meet we should discuss media tactics for Germany. Some publicity, as in the U.K. and elsewhere, is unavoidable. The question is how to handle it. You should probably largely avoid deigning these attacks with a direct personal reply, though it may not be totally possible. But we can get positive pieces written and surrogates to speak for you, if you like. I can easily help select the right people for virtually all the Berlin press - print and media. I know them all well and most listen to me. Naumann and Joffe at die Zeit would also be a good venue, as would the FAZ and the Süddeutsche. I can also solicit the right kind of piece with F. Springer for Die Welt. Influencing the TV coverage is another possibility. Let's review what makes sense.

We will reserve for you at the Adlon from 8th of September for three nights. We can adjust later. Or do you prefer the Four Seasons? Both are equally good. I'll send you more details on the opening in the near future.

Best regards.

W. MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

July 16, 2001

Dear Henry:

Best regards to Nancy.

07/16/2001 15:42

6094971888

BLUMENTHAL

W. MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL

July 16, 2001

Dear Henry:

Best regards.

a kind of mole for Mr Nixon in this effort, which
extended the war by four years, resulting in
thousands of casualties on both sides.

Perhaps the most nonsensical thing about this
charge is that it is predicated on President Thieu
having illusions about North Vietnam's Ho Chi
Minh. In fact, Thieu hardly required
inducements from American presidential
candidates to be suspicious of Hanoi's peace
negotiations. In any event, the negotiations
were not scuttled by Thieu. The peace talks,
deadlocked on procedural issues from
November 1, started again under the Johnson
administration when Saigon accepted a Soviet
offer of compromise - on Nixon's urging and
before his inauguration.

A better case could be made out (and has been,
in Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's
memoirs, among other places) for the
proposition that the Democratic administration's
peace initiative and bombing halt, shortly before
the 1968 elections, was timed to get Hubert
Humphrey elected. If anyone was using Vietnam
for domestic politics, it was the Democrats.

Mr Hitchens is aware of this argument; in an
appendix to his book, he counters that even "if
the Johnson-Humphrey regime sought to time
the talks for their own electoral purposes" they
had not done so behind the scenes, but "in
public view, and as the legally elected and
constituted government of the United States".
Presumably this makes the timing of bombing
halts for electoral purposes all right.

In chapter five of his book, Mr Hitchens outlines

*************************** - *************************** 212 759 0042- ***************************

-KISSINGER ASSOCIATES -

NO.      COM      ABBR/NTWK      STATION NAME/  PAGES      PRG.NO.      PROGRAM NAME
 TELEPHONE NO.

001      OK       @          16094971888      010/010          -

START=JUL-16 15:32 END=JUL-16 15:36

FILE NO. = 162

MODE = MEMORY TRANSMISSION

******************* -COMM.JOURNAL- ******************* DATE JUL-16-2001 TIME 15:36 P.01

HENRY A. KISSINGER

July 3, 2001

Dear Ken:

This is what we talked about today.

Warm regards,

Henry A. Kissinger

Via Messenger

Mr. Kenneth Bialkin
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom, LLP
Four Times Square, 44th Floor, Room 100
New York, NY 10036

Dictated by Dr. Kissinger and Signed in his Absence

TWENTY-SIXTH FLOOR · 350 PARK AVENUE · NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 · (212) 759-7919
FACSIMILE (212) 759-0042

# Another Dateline Please, Bartender

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

P
aging through the worthy
turgidity of the *New York*
*Times* a few weeks ago, I fell
into a sudden reverie. An
article about the reconstruc-
tion of Beirut mentioned a quixotic
attempt to reopen the Hotel St. Georges.

GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES

All at once, I pitied myself for being sentimental, and also pitied those who would not find this name piercingly evocative. In the great scorebook of journalists' hangouts, the very words "St. Georges" still have power to bring moisture to the rheumy eye. Here was the bar where, in the brave days before civil war and religious factionalism, Kim Philby would come to splash his four salaries (one from British intelligence, one from the KGB, one from the London *Observer* and one

ative comfort of
the slumped-over
position. But this
is an unfairness.
Many's the time
I have seen an
intrepid correspon-
dent walk into a bar,
obviously elated by
some march stolen
on the competition,
and actually refuse to
share the scoop even
when offered free champagne.

On the other hand, there was the old
Ledra Palace Hotel in Cyprus—now
taken over as the headquarters of the
U.N. peacekeepers—where the storied
barman Savvas was known as “the night
editor.” Seeing a favored client fallen into
a refreshing slumber over his unfinished
yet urgent copy, Savvas would take it to

ing information-marts at which I have
ever been privileged to raise an elbow—
the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. This cav-
ernous modernist hulk became the clear-
ing-house for every kind of defector,
rumor-monger, movie director and gun-
runner. Here I met a Frenchman, later
much-mangled in a car wreck, who
solemnly handed me a card giving his
profession as "specialiste de la violence."
Here I noticed the unhypocritical way in
which the management would demand
advance payment in cash, on the grounds
that one never knew who would be next
to drive over a mine or be hit by a sniper.
Much of the talk around the bar was of
different types and densities of flak-jack-
et, a fashion element that became de
rigueur at about that time.

There are press bars that I only
know by reputation, or visited when
their glory days had gone, like the
Floridita in Havana and the Aletti in
Algiers. There are others I can remem-
ber, like the Camino Real in San
Salvador or Meikles in former Salisbury,
"Rhodesia," or the Tivoli or the Bel
Canto during the Portuguese revolution,
or the Europa in Belfast, where a whiff
of Rick's Casablanca could yet be
detected. Only last year, in the most
unpromising city in the world—

ELLIOT BANFIELD

The St. Georges met all the qualifications of a Levantine drinking establishment: Spooks, diplomats, hacks, spongers, gossips, an attentive and garrulous staff.

from the *Economist*). It met all the qualifications of a Levantine drinking establishment, once defined—by me, if I may say so—as the spot where the upper middle class meets the lower Middle East. Spooks, diplomats, hacks, spongers, gossips, an attentive and garrulous staff: All the fixings. Battered and charred by the war that engulfed the city after 1975, the St. Georges was replaced by the Commodore as the place to sit out bombardments, and to pick up anything from a hot tip to a ride on a Learjet, but in the end the Hizbollah moved in and broke all the bottles in the bar, and a pall descended that has never lifted to this day.

The hot-spot or crisis bar has some-
times been cynically baptized as
"Mahogany Ridge," in memory of all the
eyewitness war stories filed from the rel-

the telex office, blue-pencil any obvious
mistakes, and file it on time to Fleet
Street—often with a crisp closing para-
graph of his own composition.

The era of electronic filing and satel-
lite phones has somewhat diminished the
need for the collectivized souk-cum-
bordello on which "the hacks," as the for-
eign press corps still call themselves, used
to depend. We shall not see again the
horrifically accurate scene painted by
Evelyn Waugh in *Scoop*, where the pride
of the international scribbling communi-
ty eavesdropped on one another, inter-
viewed the landlady as a "prominent local
hostess," and bought each other large
rounds of drinks on their employers' tabs.
Still, as recently as the war in Bosnia in
the mid-1990s, journalists were forced to
stick together in one of the most amaz-

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ■ Summer Reading Issue 2001

115

# Sneak Attack: Hollywood vs. History

BY JAMES BOWMAN

When I was a boy, my parents wouldn't let me read comic books. Of course I sneaked them into the house and read

you get in comic books, especially when consumed as a steady diet, becomes just another form of fantasy.

These thoughts occurred to me as I watched the first of this summer's block-

## THE TALKIES

them at every opportunity, at least through a two- or three-year period of my youth when I might not have been so interested in them if they had not been forbidden. But when I asked why I wasn't allowed to read them, I remember my mother replying that I would learn bad spelling habits from them. As it happens, I am quite a good speller, and most of the comics then were probably better proofread than books from university presses are nowadays. Her answer puzzled me then and it puzzles me now. I think she must have given it to buy time: because she didn't really *know* why reading comic books was bad for me. I suspect that, to her, it would have been like having bad table manners or an unpressed shirt—that is, it was a sign of inferior social origins—and that she was afraid to admit to such snobbery.

Anyway, it got me to thinking, and in a way I have been thinking about this subject ever since. It just goes to show you that when you have a serious problem to get your mind around it can be a recreation and a pastime for life—as, generally, comic books are not. Now in middle age, I have come to the conclusion that there *are* reasons why reading comic books is bad for you. Long-time readers will know of my dislike of fantasy and belief that it is debilitating to the imagination, but in a way comic-book reality is even more harmful than comic-book fantasy. For the coloring and heightening of reality that

busters, Michael Bay's *Pearl Harbor*, which uses computer animation seamlessly blended with live action to produce the same kind of heightened reality you find in a comic book. In theory there should be nothing wrong with this—at least I feel almost as much at a loss as my mother in trying to explain what is wrong with it. But it unquestionably contributes to the sense of excess that seems to me inseparable from the experience of this picture. There is too much of everything (beginning with too much money), and the views of the actual attack on Pearl Harbor are too perfect-perfect as they can only be when drawn, as in a comic.

It is an interesting question. If every visual image is scrupulously accurate, but no one at the time could actually have seen what we moviegoers see in this film, does that amount to falsification? At any rate, the experience of watching it too often produced in me a feeling of oppression at the cumulative unrealities rather than exhilaration at the sheer visual splendor of the thing. The story, too, is a comic-book tale of two handsome young fighter pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), best friends since

Pyongyang, North Korea—I found that the bar in the ghastly Koryo Hotel was slowly taking on the aura of a hangout, with chancy businessmen and visiting hacks posing as tourists, and odd young men with the business cards of Chinese and other “news agencies.” It was encouraging to see the old mixture taking form as if in a familiar cocktail-shaker; it meant that things were beginning to happen. There’s nothing like encountering “information” in its raw and untreated state; one of the reasons I became a journalist was that I didn’t want to rely on the newspapers for disclosure. Unfettered and loose-tongued reporters, in their untamed habitat, make much better sources. (Actually this isn’t always true even when it is: In the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1992 I got a sense of how the reporters were buckling to their editors in deciding that there was an exciting “New Democrat” named Bill Clinton and no need to look further. *Habemus candidatum*. Even so, one learned that the people signing this garbage didn’t always believe it.)

Hack behavior, however, need not be pack behavior. Perhaps the pressure to conform diminishes with distance from the home office. Or even, paradoxically, with proximity. In old Fleet Street a reporter with a spiked story could go across the road to El Vino and spread the word by other means; the whole subversive culture of *Private Eye*, which made secret-keeping and soft-censorship almost impossible, arose from this one wondrous fact. Nowadays, with newspapers relocated to the outer fringes of the city, and columnists e-mailing their stuff from home, London's press lacks a heart and a heartbeat that it did, in living memory, possess. While in Washington, D.C., my home town, there has been nothing even remotely resembling a journo-bar since the old “Class Reunion” on H Street closed its doors in the early Reagan days. And all I can say, viewing the mainstream journalistic product of the city, is that it shows.

Monday, July 02, 2001

To: Rebecca and Jessee
From: Theresa

HAK called late this (Monday) evening to say he did not want Stu Gold to reach Jonathan Lubell, Hitchens' attorney, until he (HAK) had a chance to speak with Gold sometime Tuesday morning. HAK said that while he agrees with what they agreed upon during their meeting, he did not want to implement it with such speed.

I was able to reach Dan Mosley on his cellular (203/536-4729), who called Stu Gold at his home and left a voice mail. Mosley did not know whether Gold had phoned Lubell yet, although he didn't think Gold had gotten back to his office until 6:00pm or so. At that time, Mosley asked me for a copy of the materials pertaining to Hitchens that HAK had during the meeting.

I got back to HAK in the car to let him know the status of Mosley's communication with Gold. I also asked HAK if it was okay to send Mosley the information he asked for, and HAK said it was fine. (I have the original packet on Stephanie's desk, packaged up and ready for her to bring over to Mosley's office first thing in the morning.) Rebecca, attached is a copy of what I sent (according to HAK's instructions), should you need it tomorrow. At the end of the day, please give the entire packet back to Jessee to lock up in my office.

HAK added that he thought Mosley could handle getting a copy to Gold.

Finally, HAK said to make sure you have Gold's number for when he wants to phone him tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. I have Gold's home number from when Mosley called him last night (212/431-9647), 212-474-1394 but you should get his office number (I guess from Mosley) too. Summer hours full time: Westport (CT) 203-222-9784

Thank you. Feel free to call me on my cellular phone (201/832-1912) or leave a message at home (201/689-1622) if you need to reach me tomorrow.

DIE WELT

Druckversion

Sent by Mrs. von Ruxleben
on 7/2/01

6/29/01

[cc]

# Nennst du mich Kriegsverbrecher, nenn ich dich Auschwitzleugner

In den USA eskaliert der Streit zwischen dem Journalisten Christopher Hitchens und Ex-Außenminister Henry Kissinger

Von Uwe Schmitt

Nicht einmal die Bewunderer des britischen, seit 1982 in Amerika sesshaften Journalisten Christopher Hitchens bestreiten, dass er zuweilen in seinen Polemiken das Gemüt eines Kopfgeldjägers mit den Umgangsformen eines Folterknechts verbindet. Der maliziöse Hohn, mit dem der 53 Jahre alte Altlinke alles überzieht, was heilig oder mächtig ist - von Mutter Theresa ("The Missionary Position") bis Bill Clinton ("No One Left To Lie To") -, hat seinen Ruf derart ruiniert, dass Kabel-Talkshows sich um ihn reißen. Dass Hitchens sich bevorzugt von Whisky und Zigaretten ernährt, steigert den gruseligen Effekt.

Für seine Verächter trifft es sich jedoch schlecht, dass Christopher Hitchens zugleich einer der originellsten Kultur- und Literaturkritiker seines Gastlandes und so eminent gebildet ist, dass sein in Oxford geschulter Scharfsinn selbst im "New York Review Of Books" hervorsticht. Er mag ein arroganter Moralist und ruchloser Feind sein, aber töricht ist er seiten und langweilig nie. Ganz sicher jedenfalls ist Hitchens nicht dumm genug, ein "Holocaust-Leugner" zu sein.

Eben dies aber behauptete unlängst Henry Kissinger (78) in gleich zwei Fernsehinterviews. Allerdings erst, als er gefragt wurde, was er zu Hitchens' Buch "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" (WELT vom 14. 6.) zu bemerken habe, das eine Anklageerhebung gegen Kissinger, den "Kriegsverbrecher" in Vietnam, Laos, Chile, Pakistan, Indonesien, Zypern, verlangt. Der unantastbar seinen Ruhm und sein Vermögen mehrende Doyen aller Geopolitiker hatte diese Streitschrift, im April in zwei langen Teilen in "Harper's Magazine" vorabgedruckt, nur eines Wortes gewürdigt. "Verachtenswert" nannte er Hitchens' Vorwürfe nach Lektüre weniger Auszüge. Dabei hätte er es bewenden lassen sollen.

Nun kann Hitchens die Beleidigung (und sein Glück) kaum fassen, dem Mann mit Verleumdungsklage drohen zu können, der es klagelos hinnahm, von ihm ein Mörder und Kriegsverbrecher geziehen zu werden, "weil er mich nicht vor Gericht sehen will", wie Hitchens genüsslich hinzufügt. Er selbst und seine Frau Carol seien jüdischer Herkunft, sagt er, wissend, dass das nichts beweist. Kissingers Vorwurf gründet vermutlich auf einer Verteidigungsrede, die Hitchens 1996 für das Recht David Irvings verfasste, sein Buch "Goebbels" in den USA zu veröffentlichen. Es ging nicht um eine Solidarisierung mit dem Privathistoriker und noch nicht um den "Auschwitz-Leugner". Sondern um Irvings Verleger, der unter Druck verzichtet hatte.

Hitchens war damals nicht allein. Richard Cohen, Kolumnist der "New York Times", zählte zu den Kritikern einer freiwilligen Selbstkontrolle. Und Cohen fühlte sich am Dienstag dieser Woche genötigt, höchst wiederstrebend Hitchens gegen die ("grausame") Anschuldigung des Emigranten Kissinger in Schutz zu nehmen. Er könne dem smarten Provokateur gewiss alles Mögliche nachsagen, aber er dürfe nicht de facto an dessen Verstand zweifeln. Kissinger möge einfach sagen, dass es ihm leid tue, schlug Cohen vor. Mit dieser Intervention erreicht der Streit eine neue Seriösität.

Auch Henry Kissinger hat ein Buch vorgelegt. Ihm wird in respektvollen Rezensionen testamentarisches Gewicht zugemessen - aber nicht ohne den zuvor ignorierten Angriff von Hitchens zu erwähnen und ihn als "stalinistischen Schauprozess" zurückzuweisen oder als Polemik zu bedauern, die eine innere Wahrheit durch Hass verrate.

"Braucht Amerika eine Außenpolitik?", fragt Kissingers Buch und richtet sein donnerndes "Und wie" auch an George W. Bush, den er im Wahlkampf beriet. Was die Welt keinesfalls braucht, sind nach Überzeugung Kissingers Bezirksrichter in ehemaligen Diktaturen oder gar Drittländern, die im Namen des Völkerrechts Pinochet so jagen wie Milosevic und politische Rechnungen begleichen, die sie nichts angingen. Was, wenn Angehörige von Pinochets Opfern in Frankreich klagen, und der Richter dem zufällig durchreisenden Kissinger im Pariser "Ritz" eine Vorladung überreichen lässt? So geschah es jüngst. Kissinger reiste wütend ab. Die großen US-Zeitungen fanden die Episode nicht der Rede wert. Seltsam. Christopher Hitchens überliefert sie in "The Nation" unter dem Titel "Der Flüchtling" und hängt seinem bösen Traum nach: Ein Gericht zwingt Kissinger zur Herausgabe seiner amtlichen Dokumente, die er der Kongress-

Bibliothek vermachte. Unter der Bedingung, sie erst nach seinem Tod zugänglich zu machen.

TOTAL P. 01

APR-20-2001 15:54

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.01

BOOKS AND ARTS

two complementary essays, he looks at Indians from Oaxaca. In one, he tells how tens of thousands now live, obsessed by basketball, in Los Angeles; in another, he shows how Indian community organisation is slowly transforming for the better the lives of tomato pickers on commercial farms at San Quintin in Baja California.

Mr Quinones has a keen eye and ear for Mexico's changing popular culture: one of his essays concerns the life and early death of Chalino Sanchez, a toneless singer of narco-corridas, or ballads, chronicling the exploits of drug traffickers who span the northern border. In a corner of Michoacan state, the author comes across a gang of crack and substance users who call themselves West Side Kansas Street. But Mr Quinones also shows how familiarity with a freer society across the border contributed to destroying the tolerance of ordinary Mexicans for the PRI. He has a fine understanding of how the PRI managed to survive for so long by buying loyalty through a myriad of small deals, but how it also trapped Mexico in an inert and mediocre bureaucratic culture.

It is Mr Quinones's contention that there is "another Mexico", which is "not always pretty" but is vital, dynamic and self-reliant, and "is often found on the country's margins". It is that Mexico which took many academics and armchair pundits by surprise, and finally booted out the PRI in last year's presidential election. Its winner, Mr Fox, is a candid, individualistic politician of immigrant roots, and a former manager of Coca-Cola in Mexico. That makes him, as Ms Guillermoprieto notes, "the unlikeliest, least tipico president Mexicans could have chosen". Both these books help to explain why Mr Fox won, and in doing so they shed light on deeper changes in Latin America.

Washington vendettas

Oh, Henry

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER. By Christopher Hitchens. Verso; 172 pages; $22 and £15

IN OFFICE, Henry Kissinger often remarked that even paranoiacs had real enemies. However, it is doubtful that he envisioned Christopher Hitchens. Mr Hitchens asserts in this short squib that he felt compelled to omit a great deal of creditable material and confined himself "to the identifiable crimes that should be placed on a proper bill of indictment". Actually, he passes along any odour he thinks he has sniffed.

Mr Hitchens's first sentence contains his only understatement, an acknowledgment that he is "a political opponent" of the former secretary of state. He concludes by de-

scribing Mr Kissinger as a "deceitful and honourless toad", a phrase that captures his polemical and relentless assault on all of Mr Kissinger's attributes, from his "rather gross" manners to his alleged war crimes. It is hard to take seriously a book which asserts that "the single greatest achievement" of a man who counts the Nobel peace prize among his distinctions was "to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor'".

Mr Hitchens's curtain-raiser deals with Mr Kissinger's role during the run-up to election day in 1968. Mr Hitchens claims that the Americans who were negotiating in Paris with the North Vietnamese confided in Mr Kissinger that a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam was in the works. His story continues with Mr Kissinger passing this information on to Richard Nixon in a successful job-seeking effort. Candidate Nixon then uses the tip to urge the South Vietnamese government to stand firm against any agreement that might have helped the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey. His tactic succeeds in delaying the end of the American bombing of North Vietnam and helps get Nixon elected. The result is four more years of an unwinnable and murderous war. By Mr Hitchens's logic, Mr Kissinger is responsible for the continuation of the war.

In "A Tangled Web" (1998), William Bundy, Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, presented a careful study of Mr Kissinger's foreign policy under President Nixon. Mr Bundy was decidedly unsympathetic to the conduct of Mr Kissinger. Nonetheless, after examining the evidence at length, Mr Bundy concluded that Mr Kissinger had never passed along that inside information. Even if he had, this would reflect only on Mr Kissinger's morality but would have no bearing on any charge of criminality. Mr Hitchens does not try to show that Mr Kissinger was involved in, supported, or was even aware of Republican efforts to impede the Paris negotiations.

There is no attempt to connect the dots.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, after reading a less than convincing attack on Plato by an adolescent Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, advised the youth, that "when you strike at a king you must kill him." Mr Hitchens, on a good day, is one of the wickedest controvertialists around. In "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" he has barely grazed a formidable target.

Motor mergers

Breakdowns

END OF THE ROAD: BMW AND ROVER— A BRAND TOO FAR. By Chris Brady and Andrew Lorenz. Financial Times/Prentice Hall: 174 pages; £19.99.

WHEELS ON FIRE: THE AMAZING INSIDE STORY OF THE DAIMLERCHRYSLER MERGER. By David Waller. Hodder & Stoughton; 334 pages, $29.95 and £18.99

IN 1994, BMW bought Rover, the last major British-owned car company, in an effort to become a mass-market manufacturer and achieve economies of scale. Altogether it poured £4.5 billion ($7 billion) into the deal, an investment which was completely wasted. BMW sold the company a year ago for £10.

In 1998, Daimler-Benz, also based in south Germany, in Stuttgart, bought Chrysler, the smallest of the "Big Three" American car companies in Detroit, for much the same reason. At the time, this, the biggest industrial merger anywhere, was widely hailed as a master stroke. Since last summer, however, Chrysler, once the most profitable car maker in America, has tumbled into loss and has gobbled up nearly all of the $7 billion it had set aside for a rainy day, just as the American economy may be heading into recession. Those Chrysler bosses who had not already

80

THE ECONOMIST, APRIL 21ST 2001

TOTAL P.01

She liked him

News recently: During his confirmation hearings, attorney general-designate John Ashcroft said the Supreme Court's rulings on abortion are "the settled law of the land," and added, "I don't think it's the agenda of the president-elect of the United States to seek an opportunity to overturn Roe." He wasn't speaking off the cuff; these words were carefully prepared by the Bush transition team, and are sure

The movement should now
dedicate itself to passing an
abortion-survivor law.

to be read back to the first Supreme Court nominee Bush sends to the Senate: "Do you agree with Attorney General Ashcroft that Roe is 'the settled law of the land'?" Then there was Laura Bush's statement on the *Today* show that "I don't think that [Roe] should be overturned." The pro-life movement was eager to have a Republican First Lady who shares their

views; but if there's a litmus test for determining who is pro-life, opposition to Roe is a pretty good one. Perhaps Mrs. Bush, like many Americans, is confused about what overturning Roe would accomplish. In any event, her statement was hardly encouraging to pro-lifers—who would do well to start looking for some concrete accomplishments.

There are several reasonable steps the Bush team could take in the short term. They could reverse Clinton-era guidelines that allow research resulting in the destruction of human embryos, and push for increased penalties for crimes committed against pregnant women, as well as a prohibition on taking minors across state lines for the purpose of evading abortion restrictions.

What's more, the pro-life movement as a whole should now dedicate itself to passing an abortion-survivor law on the federal level, and should do so with the same intensity it recently devoted to the partial-birth-abortion ban. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act would protect children who live through an abortion procedure. There have been several reports of this actually happening; the children involved died when they were denied medical attention. Forty-one states already have laws along these lines.

If a federal abortion-survivor law were to save even a single life, it would be worthwhile. It would also serve another important function: It would acknowledge the rights of children as independent from those of their mothers. Pro-choice politicians have been very successful at focusing on the health of women in the context of abortion, without ever making reference to the interests of their children. Virtually everyone this side of NARAL agrees that the line between abortion and infanticide must be drawn somewhere; the whole partial-birth-abortion effort was a failed attempt to do this. Delivering explicit rights to babies who somehow outlive abortions is a reasonable place to start. It's not even a new idea; Hadley Arkes first proposed it on these pages more than twelve years ago ("How to Roll Back Roe," October 28, 1988). Since then, Arkes has been a dogged advocate of this legislation, calling it a "modest first step." It's a modest step the pro-life movement should now take. Call it a baby step. NR

FEB 05 2001

INTERNATIONAL LAW

One Man's
War Criminal . . .

A mad leftist project,
revealed

JOHN O'SULLIVAN

LAST weekend in New York, it was all but impossible to buy the latest issue of *Harper's*. The magazine contained the first half of Christopher Hitchens's vast "indictment" of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, for carrying out a foreign policy of which Hitchens disapproves; and it had sold out in the first 15 or so places I checked. A second installment is forthcoming in the March issue, but having read the first, I predict that the next issue will not sell out. Hitchens writes gracefully, as always, but his organization of the complicated material is rambling, tortuous, and confused.

Not without reason, however—for clarity would be fatal to his argument. Insofar as his thesis can be briefly summed up, it is that Kissinger can and should be prosecuted for carrying out policies that are now recognized under the "Pinochet precedent" as war crimes or crimes against humanity. His indictment has several weaknesses: In some cases, the actions denounced by Hitchens are not war crimes; in others, Kissinger did not commit them; in still others, both.

A wonderful example of this last was pointed out by columnist George Jonas in Canada's *National Post*. Jonas noted that Hitchens cited Kissinger's mere contemplation of bombing North Vietnamese dikes as evidence of a "regnant mentality" disposed seriously to consider committing war crimes. But destroying dikes to weaken North Vietnam's economy would have been not a war crime, but an attack on a legitimate military target. The British destroyed German dams in World War II, and the NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo war also targeted its economic infrastructure. If Hitchens believes such acts to be war crimes, why

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is he targeting Kissinger (who, after all, rejected them) rather than Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who carried them out? The idea is absurd. Hitchens can nonetheless content himself with having invented a new international felony: a "war-thought-crime."

When it comes to actions that Kissinger actually took—or, more precisely, for which he bore a partial responsibility as a member of the Nixon administration—the indictment becomes nothing more than restaging of leftist anti-Vietnam nostalgia. Kissinger is accused, for instance, of "treating two whole countries—Laos and Cambodia—as if they were disposable hamlets." This accusation should, instead, be leveled at the North Vietnamese, who took over entire portions of Cambodia and used them as bases to supply their forces and attack U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. Objecting to this intrusion on their neutrality, the Cambodians invited the U.S. to evict the North Vietnamese. What subsequently happened to the Cambodian people was a tragedy—but it

was one begun by the North Vietnamese and completed by their sometime allies, the Khmer Rouge, who were in fact guilty of monumental crimes against humanity.

Hitchens sees the entire American prosecution of the Vietnam War after October 1968 as, in itself, a gigantic war crime—and all who died between October 1968 and April 1975 as victims crying out to The Hague for vengeance. Or, as he writes: "Kissinger had to know that every casualty in Indochina after 1968 was avoidable."

Even if that were so, it would not justice placing on Kissinger the entire blame for decisions taken by a democratically elected government. But it is not so. Hitchens's whole indictment on the Vietnam issue rests on the delusion that the North Vietnamese were willing to reach a genuine compromise at the Paris peace talks in October 1968. Given that assumption, he charges Kissinger with two crimes: being part of a Republican plot to encourage President Thieu of South Vietnam to resist the peace deal so that Nixon would win the 1968 election;

and then continuing a needless war for partisan political purposes.

Neither charge survives examination. To begin with, the 1968 "bombing pause" that Hitchens supposes would have brought about peace was itself a partisan decision designed to win the election for Hubert Humphrey—as the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin, among other Soviet sources, reveal: "With the presidential election only days away and Humphrey trailing in the public opinion polls largely because of his identification with Johnson's conduct of the war, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk telephoned on October 31 to inform me that the president would announce the complete cessation of bombing North Vietnam the following day."

Further, the eventual 1972-3 peace agreement was itself made possible only by U.S. and South Vietnamese military successes. The agreement was a de facto recognition by Hanoi in 1972 that they were not certain to win—a recognition they had been unwilling to make in 1968. Those who died in the intervening years

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were the victims not of Kissinger, but of
North Vietnamese aggression.

Hitchens's indictment, then, is a slow-
motion replay of the radical Left's stan-
dard grievances of the 1970s. Why, then,
does Hitchens deserve the thanks of all
sensible people for slogging his way
through it?

Hitchens's article appeared in a major
magazine. It apparently sold out, at least
in Manhattan. And it has been treated
respectfully by some mainstream news
organizations—notably an approving
article in the January 30 *Washington Post*
by Peter Carlson (whose irony, alas, con-
tains more lead than a church roof).
Here—placed before a large and influen-
tial audience—is proof that the idea of
arresting and putting on trial a distin-
guished former secretary of state is no
longer a sort of disgusting joke, but actu-
ally thinkable. Indeed, as Jeremy Rabkin,
a Cornell specialist in international law,
points out, the FBI issued a discreet
warning a year ago to former American
officials not to visit countries where they
might be seized for trial—and there were
some West European countries on the
list. The proposed International Criminal
Court even encourages such trials in its
preamble, which states that "it is the duty
of every State to exercise its jurisdiction
over those responsible for international
crimes." The rules under which former
officials might be tried are disturbingly
flexible and reliant on shifting definitions
of "war crimes" and "crimes against hu-
manity." Pinochet, for instance, was tried
under the U.N. Torture Convention
because it provided the British court with
the convenient justification of "universal
jurisdiction"—even though the charge
was based on the beating of a suspect in a
Chilean police station, of which incident
Pinochet was almost certainly unaware
and which occurred when he was on the
verge of leaving power and had every
incentive not to murder bystanders.

This, in short, is why we must be grate-
ful to Hitchens: He has given us an
advance copy of the indictment some
future secretary of state might face—a
rehash of the indignant platitudes of the
journalistic Left, dressed up in legal jar-
gon by lawyers from Amnesty Inter-
national or Human Rights Watch.

We have been very adequately warned.
We owe Hitchens a hearty meal, before
our own execution.
NR

■ HOLLYWOOD ■

Like, Strike,
Dude

The Hollywood
writer-worker

ROB LONG

THE only thing worse than being in a
meeting with three writers is being
in a meeting with 300 writers, which
unfortunately describes a meeting of the
Writers Guild of America, West.

Every few years, the WGA—the putative trade union of screenwriters—suffers an institutional nervous breakdown as its members, made up entirely of writers and therefore unable to agree on anything, attempt to agree on the terms of a new contract with the studios. The current contract expires on May 1, and for the past few months Hollywood has been thick with strike talk.

The sticking point invariably centers
around some new profit source exploited
by the studios—DVD sales, say, or pay-
per-view satellite broadcasts—that they
have neglected to pass on to the writer.
The working writers—and that number
is considerably smaller than 100 percent
of the membership of the WGA, West—
tend to be philosophical about these
issues. Sure, we get angry and bitter. But
we're writers. We were angry and bitter
before we got into this business. In some
cases I could mention, anger and bitter-
ness were the primary inspiration to sad-
dle up and move to Los Angeles in the
first place. I know one guy who became a
television writer simply because it afford-
ed him the opportunity to write on a cop
show and name all the strippers, crack
whores, and nude female corpses after his
mother.

The non-working writers are a more
querulous lot. Some are retired and liv-
ing in affluent boredom. For them, a

Mr. Long is an NR contributing editor
and a non-unemployed Hollywood
television writer.

messy writers strike is an exercise in self-
dramatics. What fun to glide over to the
picket line in their BMWs and Bentleys
and get into a Clifford Odets-style
working-class dustup! And how nice to
be able to do it in temperate Los Angeles,
so warm and dry and generously supplied
with upscale lunch spots.

The second group of non-working
writers are the unemployeds. These are
writers who haven't sold a script or drawn
a writer's paycheck in years, but who
remain passionately involved members of
the guild and its hardest-to-satisfy voting
bloc. For some reason, years of unem-
ployment do not lead to difficult person-
al decisions ("I must stop dreaming of
success and riches. I must stop talking to
my friends about my next big script sale. I
must realize that my job at Blockbuster is
not just 'temporary' or a 'great place to
people-watch and get material,' but,
instead, my true livelihood, and I will
begin to treat it as such by arriving on
time and in uniform, and not waste a
customer's time criticizing his rental
choices"), but rather to a stubborn and
highly irrelevant obsession with the
writer's potential share of hypothetical
ancillary revenue generated by a script
that hasn't been written, and if written
won't be sold unless the writer is repre-
sented by an agent, who won't sign him
because—and this is crucial—his scripts
don't sell. Did I mention that this is the
largest segment of the voting population
of the WGA?

Freed from the burden of actually hav-
ing to show up to a job every day, they
look to the occasional strike to round out
their social calendar, to catch up with old
friends on the picket line. And since all
writers crave excuses for not writing,
what better excuse for being unproduc-
tive than a strike? Writing? Not me. I'm
honoring my brother and sister scribes! I'm
taking part in the labor movement! Lazy?
Untalented? Nope. Just committed to
social justice. Rarely has sitting on your
ass outside the studio gates, carrying a
picket sign while eating a ham sandwich,
ever seemed so glamorous.

So, the working writers—especially
the young ones—hate strike talk. A
strike means television- and movie-
production halts. Paychecks stop coming.
Writers with cushy studio deals (ahem)
find that their contracts enter something
called "suspend and extend," which

76

02/05/01 MON 11:00 TAX 202 667 5222

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ECS

00:05

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<table><tr><td>title</td></tr></table>

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

<table><tr><td>author</td><td>Christopher Hitchens</td></tr><tr><td>category</td><td>Biography - Biography</td></tr><tr><td>reviewer</td><td>Raymond Seitz</td></tr><tr><td>date reviewed</td><td>23 April 2001</td></tr><tr><td>publisher</td><td>Verso</td></tr><tr><td>date published</td><td>23 April 2001</td></tr><tr><td>format</td><td>Hardback</td></tr><tr><td>ISBN</td><td>1859846319</td></tr></table>

No case against Kissinger

An unconvincing indictment of the statesman

THE PRINCIPAL trial in Christopher Hitchens's latest book is reading it. Although Hitchens is purportedly building a legal case against the former American Secretary of State, he is in fact a one-man lynch mob. Kissinger, he tells us, is a vicious, blood-thirsty, egomaniacal profiteering fiend, a kind of black-cloaked Bela Lugosi of statecraft, who in the course of eight demonic years as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State (1969-1977) was personally responsible for numerous instances of mass murder and assorted other war crimes in corners of the globe as varied as East Timor, Bangladesh, Cyprus and Chile.

Hitchens was obviously delighted by the detention of General Pinochet last year in Britain while Her Majesty's government tried to figure out how to respond to an extradition order from a Spanish magistrate. He believes the decision by the House of Lords upholding the Spanish request effectively destroyed the defence of "sovereign immunity".

The Pinochet imbroglio ended in such a fog that the importance of the legal precedent has yet to be established. At the time, however, there were many thoughtful observers who harboured little sympathy for Pinochet but who worried that the case itself would open the door to feckless, self-righteous charges against other political leaders in other legal circumstances. This is a concern which Mr Hitchens's scurrilous attack appears to validate.

Hitchens begins his breathless indictment by revealing a secret.

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"Here is the secret in plain words", he announces. "In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam . . . and the chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger."

The attempt by the Nixon presidential campaign to undermine the talks in Paris may still be a secret in Omaha but it is pretty well known everywhere else. It was a deplorable act and possibly illegal in American law. It is equally true, however, that the Paris talks were a sham.

Hitchens none the less insinuates vaguely that Kissinger was responsible for the collapse of the conference and therefore the prolongation of the war and therefore the prolongation of the killing and therefore he is a murderer. As in most of the book this is prosecution by flimsy innuendo.

Hitchens rises to the risible in his chapter on East Timor. Here he quotes at length from a memorandum of a conversation in which Kissinger excoriates his aides for dispatching a cable that would effectively suspend arms sales to Indonesia. As usual, Kissinger berates his subordinates and frets about leaks. At the crescendo of his diatribe, he says, "I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it. I get no rakeoff."

This is nothing more than classic Kissingerian sarcasm. But the ever-forensic Hitchens cries a sly, Holmesian "Ah ha!" and asks why Kissinger "felt it necessary to deny he could profit personally from arms shipments, a denial for which nobody had asked him." Hitchens is so riveted by this "evidence" that the quote merits an "Afterword" at the end of the book in which Hitchens explains how Kissinger today makes a lot of money by influence peddling and consorting with capitalists. Such clumsy, vitriolic acrobatics characterise almost all of Hitchens's examples throughout the book.

Henry Kissinger steered American foreign policy through eight difficult years when the Cold War was at its most global. He made a lot of mistakes and no one would ever accuse him of moral preoccupations. He managed to outrage both the left and the right of the American political spectrum. But to accuse him of criminality is an altogether different order of business. Christopher Hitchens is a challenging journalist and gifted writer. Blackstone he is not.

* Raymond Seitz was US Ambassador to the UK from 1991 to 1994.

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TUESDAY MARCH 20 2001

# Rewriting the past for the battles of today

MICHAEL GOVE

**History is being distorted in a growing assault on truth and memory**

Two men have recently tried to grab Justice's sword to refight history's battles. David Irving is a discredited figure of the far Right, Christopher Hitchens a celebrated gadfly of the New Left, Irving's reputation lies in tatters, Hitchens enjoys a *passepartout* to the salons of Washington and London, Irving is a study in wickedness, Hitchens one in mischief. But both have been engaged in attempts to diminish past totalitarian crimes the better to advance contemporary political agendas. Neither can afford to be dismissed as a mere *litte* whose only aim is to challenge conventional wisdom, as two new books show.

The *Holocaust on Trial; History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case* by D.D.Guttenplan demonstrates how Irving set out to use our libel courts to provide a platform for his revisionist account of the Second World War. *The Trial of Henry Kissinger* by Christopher Hitchens is an attempt by the author to use the establishment of an international criminal court as a platform for his own revisionist account of the Cold War.

Irving found himself in the libel courts because of his obsessive desire to diminish and downplay the transcendent evil of the Holocaust. His revisionist reading of the Second World War sets out to challenge the historical fact of Hitler's genocidal campaign against the Jews. Irving's Holocaust denial, as Guttenplan shows, is not simply a wicked intellectual conceit but central to his twisted ideology. The fact of the Holocaust is the single greatest obstacle to the rehabilitation of the far-right views which Irving holds. By denying the Holocaust's historical singularity, or even its existence, apologists for the far Right seek to re-establish Hitler and the Nazi regime as legitimate players in history's pageant from whom the Post-Modern polemicist may draw "interesting" lessons.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,252-101947,00.html

5/8/01

The Times

Page 2 of 3

When Irving's malicious agenda and malign *modus operandi* were exposed by Deborah Lipstadt in her book *Denying the Holocaust; the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory*, he recognised a threat to his project and sued. Because the English libel courts still, inexplicably, place upon the defendant the burden of proving his innocence, Irving hoped that the odds would be tilted in his favour. In any event, he calculated, he would be given a public platform for his revisionism. Fortunately, his calculations were undone by the meticulous deconstruction of his case by Lipstadt's lawyers. He was shown to have suppressed, altered and doctored the truth to serve his own ends and his reputation took a battering from which, mercifully, it can never recover.

But revisionism is not the sole preserve of the far Right, and Hitchens's book is a timely reminder of the rewriting of history being attempted by the Left. Just as the crimes of Nazism constitute an ineradicable obstacle to the promotion of far-right ideology, so the corpse-littered history of communism impedes the radical ambitions of many on the New Left.

That real existing socialism led to the extinguishing of millions of real existing human beings is too much reality for many Left radicals to bear. That communism was defeated by the exertions of Conservative leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the liberal democracies of America and Britain makes reality, and history, insupportable for them. So history must be rewritten.

Hitchens and his fellow travellers recognise that the gulags cannot be written out of our past, so they attempt to pitch new "facts" into Justice's scales. They replay the old game of "moral equivalence" by charging the West with war crimes as great as any committed in communism's name. By so doing, they seek to diminish the evil of socialist totalitarianism and weaken the moral authority of those liberal democracies in the West, most notably America, whose past victories and present policies they cannot bear.

Fortunately for history, and the West, Hitchens has none of the cool mastery of facts required to support his ends. Hitchens has chosen Kissinger as a still vital survivor of the Cold War, a living reminder of our struggles, and sought to demonise him by laying at his door every conceivable abuse of human rights. Kissinger, and by extension the West, are held accountable for sins as varied as the genocide of Bangladeshis, the murder of Chilean generals, the deposing of

5/8/01

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Cypriot leaders and the sabotaging of Vietnamese peace talks. In Hitchens's account of the Cold War Kissinger lurks at the centre of every conspiracy, a malign intelligence directing world evil which might have leapt from the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*.

Hitchens is much more a poor man's Oliver Stone than a latter-day Hartley Shawcross. In his scattergun mix of occasional fact, tendentious interpretation and wishful thinking he resembles a Hollywood conspiracy theorist more than the coolly rational prosecutor of war crimes he imagines himself to be.

And yet Hitchens's allegations have been serialised with all solemnity by *Harpers' magazine* in the United States and *The Guardian* here. That one of America's leading liberal magazines and Britain's pre-eminent left-wing broadsheet should be so eager to indulge Hitchens's revisionism tells us something about the appetite for denigration of their own countries among the West's leftish elites. It may seem amusing to play *Knock Down Ginger* with Dr Kissinger's reputation, ringing the leper's bell which peals "war criminal" and then running away. But the consequences are more malign than they appear to recognise. By placing Dr Kissinger in the dock, they collude in the attempt to let communism off the hook. They are, in Lipstadt's words, part of a growing assault on truth and memory.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

Copyright 2001 **Times Newspapers Ltd.** This service is provided on Times Newspapers' **standard terms and conditions**. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the **Syndication website**.

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002

to suck') in Germany. If in six war years the record sold only 50,000 copies, the song was maturing, deepening, in Billie's ever more drugged and tragic rendition: 'throat-tightening' as *Time* put it, certainly no 'June-moon-croon tune' as she put it herself.

But American jazz critic Ralph Gleason heads the hyperbolists: 'She was a sort of living lyric to the song, hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself.' Over 60 years the Meeropol family earned a skimpy $300,000 for it. These admiring and admirable pages put both the issues and the verses chNicly in perspective for a new century that shows few signs of growing out of the need for such spirited arias of rage.

A parody
of
justice

Conrad Black

THE TRIAL OF HENRY
KISSINGER

by Christopher Hitchens

Verso, £13, pp. 170, ISBN 1859846319

This is not really a book at all. It is a malicious polemic from a notorious pamphleteer. Having relentlessly supported the communist side in the Cold War, Christopher Hitchens has here tried to cast one of the most distinguished statesmen of the Western Alliance as a criminal of that war. Henry Kissinger is such a unique personality that he is a particular source of frustration to his enemies. A formidable academic historian and theorist of international affairs as well as one of the outstanding secretaries of state in American history, he continues, nearly 25 years after leaving public office, to be a statesman of great renown and continuing influence.

Kissinger has always been a bête noire to the Western seekers of communist victory in the Cold War. Because of his heavy German accent and transcultural syntax, he has been a goldmine for parody by comics and impersonators. This folkloric status and the eminent role he played in the Nixon administration, the most controversial of all American presidencies, have made him the supreme target of the old Western Left, to whose endless mudslinging his reputation has been practically impervious. Few on the left have been more slavishly and unrigorously hostile than Christopher Hitchens.

When Richard Nixon and Henry

Kissinger came to office in 1969 the United States had 545,000 conscripts in an undeclared war at the ends of the earth, no arms control negotiations with the USSR, no worthwhile contacts with China, and almost no relations with the Arab powers apart from Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco. The Soviet Union and its allies were generally gaining ground in their conflict with the West and almost casually suppressed efforts at liberalisation in the Eastern bloc, as in Prague in 1968.

After five years, the United States had negotiated its departure from Vietnam with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed. It had negotiated an arms limitation agreement with the USSR, the beginning of a civilised relationship with China, and the US-brokered beginning of the normalisation of relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours, with the consequent elimination of almost all Soviet influence in the Middle East. Kissinger further irritated his enemies by remaining untouched by the Watergate scandal and by winning the Nobel Prize for Peace.

All of this rankles with Hitchens and others in the West who regret the Western victory in the Cold War and especially the emergence of the United States as an overwhelmingly pre-cminent power in the world. The first lie is in the title of this work, which, as much as the identity of the

been adduced, and certainly isn't here, that he had any role in any such activity.

Hitchens drags out the old allegations that Kissinger was complicit in the deaths of Chile's Marxist President Allende and apolitical chief of staff General Rene Schneider in 1973. These charges have been exhaustively explored by US Senate committees almost as anxious as Hitchens to assassinate Kissinger's reputation. The evidence is decisive that Kissinger stopped US assistance to a coup attempt and had nothing at all to do with the death of either man and that he disapproved and regretted both events. Hitchens construes the absence of any evidence inculpatory of Kissinger as proof of Kissinger's destruction of evidence. He dismisses the evidence of Kissinger's innocence as his littering the trail of investigators with red herrings of his own confection. Hitchens mustn't be confused with the facts. Where the evidence is inconvenient it must be false, and where there is no evidence to support his case, it must have been destroyed by the accused. This is the method of Stalin's show trials and possesses at least intellectual consistency with this author's previous work.

Kissinger is accused of masterminding the attempted murder of Cyprus's President, Archbishop Makarios. Kissinger's memoirs are triumphantly quoted to the effect that Makarios was the core of the problem, and that therefore Kissinger must have schemed to get rid of him. Unfortunately, with astonishing sloppiness even for a Stalinist prosecutor, Hitchens omits the balance of the same sentence from Kissinger's book; that Makarios was also the key to any solution. No evidence whatever is, or could be, presented to sustain this ludicrous allegation. It is far-fetched even for so scurrilous an assailant.

This is Hitchens' trial: no evidence other than what he invents or falsifies. It is a malicious and bungled prosecution. The accused is condemned for having possibly entertained thoughts that, if he had acted upon them, would have been controversial, what John O'Sullivan described in the *National Review* as the 'war thought crime'. This isn't legitimate argument; it is an attempt to goad one of the 20th century's greatest statesmen into a lawsuit, thus briefly elevating Hitchens to a plane of official parity with the eminent figure he has defamed. It appears also to be an attempt to win the commendation of the bedraggled remnant of the old Left to which Hitchens has been a toady for decades.

It is shaming that *Harper's* and the *Guardian* excerpted this book, but reassuring that it has been condemned by virtually every reviewer in the world. It is so contemptible that it almost makes a case for judicial book-burning; almost, but not quite. It should be preserved as evidence of the final bankruptcy, both evil and banal, of the old left.

author, betrays his character. It isn't a trial, which implies a judicial process including a defence and a deliberation. It is a defamatory and frenzied assault.

Henry Kissinger is accused of scheming to prevent a breakthrough in the Paris Vietnam peace talks in 1968 to help Richard Nixon win the US presidential election. He didn't know Nixon then and he had nothing to do with the election campaign. Not a shred of evidence has ever

THE SPECTATOR 19 May 2001 45

→→→ KISSINGER

001

ELCJ

JUN 04 2001

18001 YORBA LINDA BOULEVARD • YORBA LINDA • CALIFORNIA 92886

(714) 993-5075 FAX: (714) 528-0544

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DATE: 6/4/01

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FROM: Taylor

FAX NUMBER: __________

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COMMENTS:

## WHAT'S NEW

**The Sunshine of her Style: Gowns and Fashions of Pat Nixon**
November 15, 2000 to September 3, 2001

**RED, WHITE, AND HOPE:**
*Saluting 60 Years of USO Holiday Tours by Bob and Dolores Hope*
December 9, 2000 to May 30, 2001

Larry King tours the Library with Julie Nixon Eisenhower for a CNN special of *Larry King Live* on Wednesday, June 20, 2001
9 pm Eastern time
6 pm Pacific time

**The British are Coming!**
*4th Annual Living History Encampment*
June 30, 2001 from 10 am to 3:30 pm
July 1, 2001 from 10:am to 4:30 pm

**Dr. Henry Kissinger**
"Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
Toward A Diplomacy For the 21st Century."
July 18, 2001
Lecture 10:00 am
Booksigning 11:00 am

**Free Family Sunday Concert Series**
2:00 pm

The Telegraph - Friday, May 4, 2001 - Issue 2170

feature

(from telegraph.co.uk)

Is this man a war criminal?

Journalist Christopher Hitchens has written a savage biography of Henry Kissinger, in which he paints the former US secretary of state as a sinister manipulator of foreign governments. But, writes George Jonas, the book is a mess of half-truths and fantasy

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS does not like Henry Kissinger. He does not like him politically, which he acknowledges in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (published by Verso, the imprint of New Left Books), and he does not like him personally, which he does not specifically acknowledge, but makes abundantly clear in numerous asides.

External Links

* **Henry A. Kissinger 1973**
* **Nobel Peace Prize Laureate**
* **- Novel Prize Internet Archive**

* **Henry Alfred Kissinger**
* **biography -**
* **Nobel e-museum**

* **Henry Kissinger page**
* **- Third World Traveller**

* **Trial of Henry Kissinger - Verso Books**

* **United Nations**

* **National Security Study Memorandums (NSSM) [Nixon**

The President's Man: Kissinger with Richard Nixon

that "his single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor' ". Not a flattering portrait, but it does follow an

Mr Hitchens offers the view that Dr Kissinger's "managers are rather gross" and

**Administration, 1969-74]**

internal logic if one is attempting, as Mr Hitchens does, to build a case against one of the most significant statesmen of the 20th century as a war criminal.

Nixon
Foundation

Suggesting that Dr Kissinger - a scholar and administrator, who, as former national security adviser and secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had been the chief architect of detente with the Soviet Union, disengagement in Vietnam, and rapprochement with China - is a war criminal is not easy. (If one considers Dr Kissinger's policies of accommodation with various communist powers, it would be easier to suggest that he is a peace criminal.) The accusation gets no less nonsensical as Mr Hitchens proceeds to elaborate on his charges, but the reasons behind it begin to emerge.

Early on in his book, Mr Hitchens assumes the role of a mind reader. He conjures up an image of Dr Kissinger at a dinner party. "Every now and then," he writes, "the recipient (and donor) of so much sycophancy feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom. Is it perhaps another disclosure on a newly released Nixon tape? Some stray news from Indonesia, portending the fall or imprisonment of another patron (and perhaps the escape of an awkward document or two)?

"Kissinger cannot open the morning paper with the assurance of tranquillity. Because he knows what others can only suspect, or guess at."

Leaving aside the difficulty of reading the mind

of a fellow dinner guest, by the end of the paragraph Mr Hitchens is forced to concede that "others can only suspect, or guess at" what such a dinner guest knows. In other words, Mr Hitchens admits he is guessing, but this does not prevent him from starting the paragraph by placing "a tremor of anxiety" - ie, a consciousness of guilt - into Dr Kissinger's mind.

This device might be acceptable in a novel - except this is not a novel. Mr Hitchens is not an omniscient narrator, and Dr Kissinger is not a fictional character. In an account that purports to be factual, pretending to read a person's mind, then utilising it as a confession is so transparently malicious and misleading as to make one discount everything that follows it. Mr Hitchens is scathing, but he is scathing on thin ice.

In chapter one, entitled "Curtain-Raiser: the Secret of '68", Mr Hitchens levels one of his key accusations against Dr Kissinger. It is that to advance his own career, the future national security adviser played a pivotal role in Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon's efforts "to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam" before the 1968 elections.

The alleged method of sabotage was for Mr Nixon to privately persuade South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu (or, as Mr Hitchens puts it, "the South Vietnamese military rulers") to ditch the talks because he, Nixon, could get a better deal for Saigon from Hanoi than Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. According to Mr Hitchens, Dr Kissinger acted as

what he regards as Dr Kissinger's sinister role in
Chile. This requires some background.

Between 1970 and 1973, the world was not a
tranquil place. While Dr Salvador Allende
Gossens was importing communism to Chile,
Palestinian organisations hijacked aeroplanes to
Jordan, massacred 11 Israeli athletes in Munich
and murdered two American diplomats (Cleo
Noel and George Moore) in Khartoum.
Communist influence was rampant. The times
were not conducive to viewing with equanimity
Dr Allende, who (as Regis Debray tells it in his
book The Chilean Revolution: Conversations
with Allende) plainly stated that he aimed at
establishing "total, scientific, Marxist socialism"
in Chile.

After Dr Allende's death, Left-wing legends of
injured innocence painted him as a kind of
social democratic reformer. He was nothing of
the sort. As Dr Kissinger puts it in The White
House Years: "One should not needlessly insult
the integrity of a man who spent his life
dedicated to revolution by claiming him to be
something he always denied."

Dr Kissinger's view of Dr Allende has never been
a secret: it is plainly expressed on every
relevant page of his memoirs. He considered Dr
Allende and his policies inimical to the interests
of America, as well as the ideals of democracy.
No doubt, Dr Kissinger welcomed Dr Allende's
downfall (though, as he emphasises, not his
violent death). What Mr Hitchens fails to provide
is any evidence that the US administration or Dr
Kissinger had brought about either.

The only evidence for any US involvement in
Chile goes back to the autumn of 1970, before
Dr Allende's inauguration. The majority (62.7
per cent) of Chile's voters had cast their ballots
against Dr Allende, but since there were three
candidates, Dr Allende, with 36.2 per cent, had
the largest single share by about one per cent.
Constitutionally, in such a situation, it was up to
the Chilean Congress to choose the president.

The Nixon administration wanted to prevent Dr Allende from parlaying his one per cent into another foothold for totalitarian Marxism in Latin America. First it tried to persuade the Chilean Congress to select another candidate. When this did not work, it attempted what Dr Kissinger has described in Years of Upheaval as a "haphazard and amateurish exploration of a military coup", designed to force a run-off election between Dr Allende and the top democratic candidate. This effort was eventually called off: "More precisely," as Dr Kissinger notes, "the American part was called off, the Chilean component was bungled."

It is this bungled Chilean component to which
Mr Hitchens is attempting to link Dr Kissinger.
As it happened, the Chilean chief of staff,
General Rene Schneider, was opposed to
military interference in political matters. This
being an obstacle to using the army to bring
about a run-off election, some officers in the
Chilean military, notably a group led by General
Roberto Viaux, hatched a plot to kidnap General
Schneider.

The US administration was aware of General
Viaux's plans and provided his group with some

initial support, but when it became evident that
chances for a successful coup were less than
one in 20, the US co-ordinating committee -
called the 40 Committee - told the plotters to
abandon their efforts. On October 15, 1970, Dr
Kissinger wrote to President Nixon: "This looks
hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing would be
worse than an abortive coup." As it turned out,
however, elements of General Viaux's plotters,
along with elements of another group, and
possibly aided by some rogue CIA assets in
Chile, made two more unsuccessful attempts to
kidnap General Schneider. Finally, on October
22, General Viaux's group made another
attempt, in the course of which General
Schneider was murdered.

In his role as a private prosecutor, Mr Hitchens
charges that "Henry Kissinger bears direct
responsibility for the Schneider murder". The
problem for Mr Hitchens's prosecution is that
the evidence at his disposal has been examined
by a Senate Intelligence Committee, in 1975.
Senator Frank Church's committee was not
favourably disposed, to put it mildly, to the
Nixon administration.

The Church committee nevertheless concluded
that there was "no evidence of a plan to kill
Schneider or that United States officials
specifically anticipated that Schneider would be
shot during the abduction". Mr Hitchens seeks
to dispose of this finding by calling Dr
Kissinger's instructions to stop the plotters "a
paper-thin cover story", admitting with regret
that "this sorry cover story has even found a
refuge in the written record". The fact is, of
course, that this is the record: the only thing

supported by evidence as well as by the finding
of a Senate committee.

Kissinger's
view of
Salvador
Allende has
never been a
secret: he
considered the
Chilean leader
and his policies
inimical to the
interests of
America, as
well as the
ideals of
democracy

The record also shows that
Dr Kissinger wrote to
President Nixon on October
18, 1970, that Dr Allende's
inauguration "now appeared
certain". He would hardly
have written this if a coup
had still been an option, or if
he had anticipated General
Viaux's kidnapping attempt
that was to occur on October
22. Mr Hitchens further
charges that Dr Kissinger
cannot claim to have been
"indifferent to, or unaware
of, the true situation" of
assassination, torture and
other human rights abuses in
the southern hemisphere. As
evidence, he offers excerpts
from a memorandum of a
1976 conversation
(declassified in 1999)
between Dr Kissinger and
General Augusto Pinochet.

In fact, when read in its
entirety, the declassified document shows the
opposite of what Mr Hitchens suggests. Far from
"advising a murderer and despot to disregard
his upcoming remarks as a sop to Congress",
which is the spin Mr Hitchens puts on the
conversation between General Pinochet and the
secretary of state, Dr Kissinger was advising

Chile's president to take his remarks to heart. He was conveying a warning - diplomatically, but forcefully and unmistakably - that if General Pinochet wished to preserve the support he needed from the United States, his government had to make genuine efforts to conform to the notions western democracies had about the rule of law and civil rights.

When General Pinochet responded that "we are slowly making progress" on the human rights front, and "we have freed more" of the last 400 detainees, Dr Kissinger urged him to "have a bigger programme of releases". There was even to be a quid pro quo: the secretary knew some of the immediate items that General Pinochet wanted from the US - the embassy at Santiago had cabled him a list of matters "to provide encouragement and/or incentives to the GOC (Government of Chile) to respond to our concerns".

These concerns, of course, were human rights: not just as a gesture, but as a reality. What arouses Mr Hitchens's indignation is that in the memorandum, Dr Kissinger makes it equally clear to General Pinochet that the US administration is "not out to weaken your position" and that "we welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here".

But why should the US secretary of state, a representative of Jeffersonian democracy, not have held that view? Anyone with the slightest concern for human rights would have had to welcome the slowing of the spread of communism in the western hemisphere. In the 1970s, communism was not yet a spent force.

The system of applied Marxism that claimed (by
low estimates) 70 million victims in the 20th
century was still looking to extend itself in
various parts of the globe. Communism was
jeopardising human rights from Africa to the
Middle East. Although the US did not engineer
the downfall of Dr Allende in September 1973, it
had every reason to welcome it.

Other chapters of Mr Hitchens's book deal with
Indochina, Bangladesh and East Timor.
Essentially, the prosecution's method is similar:
Mr Hitchens concedes that "some of these
allegations can only be constructed prima facie,
since Dr Kissinger - in what may also amount to
a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of
justice - has caused large tranches of evidence
to be withheld or possibly destroyed". In other
words, Mr Hitchens turns his inability to come
up with sufficient evidence to prove his charges
against Dr Kissinger into another charge: that of
obstructing justice. The late A Y Vishinsky, who
used to run Stalin's show trials, would applaud.

In chapter seven, Mr Hitchens tells us why he
believes that Dr Kissinger should be held
responsible for "the bloody invasion of Cyprus".
Briefly, his case for the prosecution is that since
Dr Kissinger disliked the non-aligned Cypriot
president, the Archbishop Makarios, he took no
steps to prevent Greece's Right-wing military
junta ("a US client", in Mr Hitchens's words)
from engineering a coup against President
Makarios in July 1974.

As proof of Dr Kissinger's intentions, Mr
Hitchens quotes his description of President
Makarios as "the proximate cause of most of

Cyprus's tensions" from Years of Renewal, the concluding volume of Dr Kissinger's memoirs. Mr Hitchens offers this fragment as the motive for Dr Kissinger's endorsement of a coup d'état: if Dr Kissinger felt that President Makarios was "the 'proximate cause' of the tensions", Mr Hitchens writes, "then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them". Very cute - except Mr Hitchens conveniently omits the full sentence in Dr Kissinger's book (p 199): "Makarios, the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions, was also the best hope for a long-term peaceful solution". In Hollywood movies, this is where the lawyer puts down his notes and says: "The defence rests."

In his preface, Mr Hitchens contends that "the Pinochet verdict in London, the splendid activism of the Spanish magistracy and the verdicts of the International Tribunal at The Hague have destroyed the shield that immunised crimes committed under the justification of raison d'état". In fact, Mr Hitchens is ready to extend the principle a good deal further. He proposes to prosecute not only crimes but policy decisions made for reasons of state, provided they are policy decisions that run counter to his ideas.

Dressing up politics in black robes does not elevate politics, of course; it lowers justice. Incongruous as it is to discuss Dr Kissinger in the same breath with General Pinochet, the Pinochet extradition case does provide one object lesson. The lengthy wrangling in the British courts illustrated that whenever judges are inclined, for political or ideological reasons, to arrive at a certain result, they are likely to

find the legal props to support it.

General Pincochet's extradition made no sense
in law as presented in the Spanish magistrate's
initial request, which said in essence that the
international treaty on genocide should be
extended to cover the killings of political
opponents, and also authorise trials in the
national courts of other countries.

The Law Lords rejected this - not surprisingly,
because the treaty contained no such provisions
- but then agreed to have judge Baltasar
Garzon's request amended under the UN
Torture Convention, to which Britain became a
signatory in 1988, resting the entire case on a
single incident, the beating of a suspect in a
provincial police station in Chile. (This incident
took place after Chile had become a democracy
and Pinochet's government was legitimised by a
national referendum. It's rather like holding
Tony Blair responsible for a policeman's alleged
misconduct in Nottingham.)

What this indicates is that courts are not
impervious to the climate. Although the idea of
any country trying to prosecute a former US
secretary of state on the basis of assertions
such as Mr Hitchens's still seems only the erotic
dream of neutered liberals and ex-flower
children who have long fantasised about setting
up a Holy Inquisition of the Left, the FBI has
seen fit to issue quiet warnings to former
American officials about travelling in some
European countries. The danger that
international systems of justice may be hijacked
for political ends is quite real.

Since such warnings tend to be dismissed as
alarmist and exaggerated when made in the
abstract, perhaps one should be grateful to Mr
Hitchens for helping to prove the point. As the
21st century begins, we are seeing those who
were wrong during the Cold War proposing to
pass judgment on those who turned out to be
right.

George Jonas is a Canadian journalist

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher
Hitchens (Verso) is available through our retail
partner, Amazon. Click here to order a copy
online.

26 January 2001: [International] Kissinger urges Bush to shore up Nato

28 June 1999: Cold War warrior scorns 'new morality'

4 April 1999: [International] Kissinger joins call to release Pinochet

9 March 1999: [International] How Nixon turned into Tricky Dicky

4 February 1999: The power of one

13 December 1995: [International] 'Zip your lips' Princess tops the bill with Dr Kiss-inger

14 June 1995: Kissinger is made an honorary knight

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► Email

6/13/01

To: Dr. Kissinger
From: Theresa
RE: **Interview request related to Hitchens**
**book**

A producer from CNN International called to ask for a taped in-person interview for a program called "Inside Europe" which is broadcast worldwide except in the US.

He wanted to ask what your reaction is to the
international human rights campaign bringing charges
against various former officials, using Europe as the
"legal center-ground".

Is there a message you would like conveyed, or should I
just regret?

Tell them:

Just regret ✓

Don't answer

MAR-27-2001 15:55

KH1 DC

212 753 7248 P.05

When Irving's malicious agenda and malign modus operandi were exposed by Deborah Lipstadt in her book Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, he recognised a threat to his project and sued. Because the English libel courts still, inexplicably, place upon the defendant the burden of proving his innocence. Irving hoped that the odds would be tilted in his favour. In any event, he calculated, he would be given a public platform for his revisionism. Fortunately, his calculations were undone by the meticulous deconstruction of his case by Lipstadt's lawyers. He was shown to have suppressed, altered and doctored the truth to serve his own ends and his reputation took a battering from which, mercifully, it can never recover.

But revisionism is not the sole preserve of the far Right. and Hitchens's book is a timely reminder of the rewriting of history being attempted by the Left. Just as the crimes of Nazism constitute an ineradicable obstacle to the promotion of far-right ideology, so the compulsory history of

And yet Hitchens's allegations have been serialised with all solemnity by Harper's magazine in the United States and The Guardian here. That one of America's leading liberal magazines and Britain's pre-eminent left-wing broadsheet should be so eager to indulge Hitchens's revisionism tells us something about the appetite for denigration of their own countries among the West's leftish elites. It may seem amusing to play Knock Down Ginger with Dr Kissinger's reputation, ringing the leper's bell which peals "war criminal" and then running away. But the consequences are more malign than they appear to recognise. By placing Dr Kissinger in the dock, they collude in the attempt to let communism off the hook: They are, in Lipstadt's words, part of a growing assault on truth and memory.

michael reave@theguard.co.uk

TOTAL P.05

02/28/2001 15:19 FAX 4103052434

TELEGRAPH GROUP

+0171 513 2510

28/02 '01 15:31 NO.824

03/05

lage of standing him down. The
 remainder of the memo speaks plainly of the
 intention to "discourage him from acting
 like", to "continue to encourage him to
 clarify his planning" and to "encourage him
to join forces with other coup planners so
 they may act in concert either before or
 after 24 October" (italics added). The last
 two stipulations are an entirely accurate,
to say prescient, description of what
 aux actually did.

Consult again the cable received by
Henry Hecksher on October 20, referring to
ious queries "from high levels" about the
ness of the failed attacks on Schneider.
Thomas Karamessines, when questioned by
Senate Intelligence Committee about
the cable, testified of his certainty that the
ids "high levels" referred directly to
Kissinger. In all previous communications
to Washington, as a glance above will
be seen, that had indeed been the case. This on
own is enough to demolish Kissinger's
opinion to have "turned off" Track Two (and its
prior tracks) on October 15.

Ambassador Korry later made the
ous point that Kissinger was attempting
to build a paper alibi in the event of a failure
the Viaux group. "His interest was not in
the but in who was going to be blamed
what. He wanted me to be the one who
the heat. Henry didn't want to be
liated with a failure and he was setting
record to blame the State Department.
Brought me in to the President because
wanted me to say what I had to say about
x; he wanted me to be the soft man."
The concept of "deniability" was not as
understood in Washington in 1970 as it
since become. But it is clear that Henry

Kissinger wanted two things simultane-
ously. He wanted the removal of General
Schneider, by any means and employing any
proxy. (No instruction from Washington to
leave Schneider unharmed was ever given;
deadly weapons were sent by diplomatic
pouch, and men of violence were carefully
selected to receive them.) And he wanted to
be out of the picture in case such an attempt
might fail, or be uncovered. These are the
normal motives of anyone who solicits or
suborns murder.

However, Kissinger needed the crime very
slightly more than he needed, or was able to
design, the deniability. Without waiting for
his many hidden papers to be released or
subpoenaed, we can say with safety that he
is plausibly guilty of direct collusion in the
murder of a democratic officer in a deme-
ratic and peaceful country.

© Christopher Hitchens, 2001

This is an edited extract from The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens, to be published by Verso, priced £15, on April 30. To reserve a copy of this title for the reduced price of £13, plus 99p UK p&p, freephone Guardian Cultureshop on 0800 316 6102.

Continued on Monday in our G2 section:
How Kissinger made himself an accomplice
in a plan of political assassination in Cyprus
which, when it went awry, led to the deaths
of thousands of civilians, the violent uproot-
ing of almost 2,000 refugees, and the cre-
ation of an unjust and unstable amputation
of Cyprus which still constitutes a serious
threat to peace today. The Guardian's sec-
ond exclusive extract from Christopher
Hitchens's incendiary book.

02/28/2001 13:20 FAX 4163632454

TELEGRAPH GROUP

+0171 513 2510

28/02 '01 15:32 NO.824

04/05

Defamation Act 1996

c. 31

15

# SCHEDULES

## SCHEDULE I

Section 15.

### QUALIFIED PRIVILEGE

#### PART I

##### STATEMENTS HAVING QUALIFIED PRIVILEGE WITHOUT EXPLANATION OR CONTRADICTION

1. A fair and accurate report of proceedings in public of a legislature anywhere in the world.

2. A fair and accurate report of proceedings in public before a court anywhere in the world.

3. A fair and accurate report of proceedings in public of a person appointed to hold a public inquiry by a government or legislature anywhere in the world.

4. A fair and accurate report of proceedings in public anywhere in the world of an international organisation or an international conference.

5. A fair and accurate copy of or extract from any register or other document required by law to be open to public inspection.

6. A notice or advertisement published by or on the authority of a court, or of a judge or officer of a court, anywhere in the world.

7. A fair and accurate copy of or extract from matter published by or on the authority of a government or legislature anywhere in the world.

8. A fair and accurate copy of or extract from matter published anywhere in the world by an international organisation or an international conference.

#### PART II

##### STATEMENTS PRIVILEGED SUBJECT TO EXPLANATION OR CONTRADICTION

9.—(1) A fair and accurate copy of or extract from a notice or other matter issued for the information of the public by or on behalf of—

(a) a legislature in any member State or the European Parliament;

(b) the government of any member State, or any authority performing governmental functions in any member State or part of a member State, or the European Commission;

(c) an international organisation or international conference.

(2) In this paragraph "governmental functions" includes police functions.

10. A fair and accurate copy of or extract from a document made available by a court in any member State or the European Court of Justice (or any court attached to that court), or by a judge or officer of any such court.

11.—(1) A fair and accurate report of proceedings at any public meeting or sitting in the United Kingdom of—

(a) a local authority or local authority committee;

(b) a justice or justices of the peace acting otherwise than as a court exercising judicial authority;

[LC]

www.nixonlibrary.org

DATE: 3/12/01
TO: HAK
FROM: Taylor
FAX NUMBER: 2
NUMBER OF PAGES: 2

COMMENTS:

## WHAT'S NEW

November 15, 2000 to July 22, 2001

**RED, WHITE, AND HOPE:**

December 9, 2000 to May 28, 2001

**Mike Deaver**

"A Different Drummer: My Thirty
Years with Ronald Reagan."

May 2, 2001

Lecture 10:30 am

Booksigning 11:30 am

Luncheon 12:30 pm

"Larry King Live" tour with Julie Nixon Eisenhower

May 22, 2001 from 10 am to 12 pm

Lecture by Larry King 1:00 pm

Book Signing - Anything Goes 2:00 pm

**Dr. Henry Kissinger**

July 18, 2001

Lecture 10:00 am

Booksigning 11:00 am

Free Family Sunday Concert Series
2:00 pm

03/21/01 WED 19:35 FAX 4169230856

SCALES OF JUSTICE

001

The Times

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EDITOR

MICHAEL GOVE

## History is being distorted in a growing assault on truth and memory

Two men have recently tried to grab Justice's sword to refight history's battles. David Irving is a discredited figure of the far Right, Christopher Hitchens a celebrated gadfly of the New Left, Irving's reputation lies in tatters, Hitchens enjoys a *passepartout* to the salons of Washington and London, Irving is a study in wickedness, Hitchens one in mischief. But both have been engaged in attempts to diminish past totalitarian crimes the better to advance contemporary political agendas. Neither can afford to be dismissed as a mere *littérateur* whose only aim is to challenge conventional wisdom, as two new books show.

The *Holocaust on Trial; History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case* by D.D. Guttenplan demonstrates how Irving set out to use our libel courts to provide a platform for his revisionist account of the Second World War. *The Trial of Henry Kissinger* by Christopher Hitchens is an attempt by the author to use the establishment of an international criminal court as a platform for his own revisionist account of the Cold War.

Opinion

March 20, 2001

20/03/2001

http://www.thetimes.com/2001/03/20/01747-00.html

03/21/01 WED 19:36 FAX 4169230856

SCALES OF JUSTICE

002

The Times

Page 2 of 4

When Irving's malicious agenda and malign
modus operandi were exposed by Deborah
Lipstadt in her book *Denying the Holocaust; the
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory*, he
recognised a threat to his project and sued.
Because the English libel courts still,
inexplicably, place upon the defendant the burden
of proving his innocence, Irving hoped that the
odds would be tilted in his favour. In any event,
he calculated, he would be given a public
platform for his revisionism. Fortunately, his
calculations were undone by the meticulous
deconstruction of his case by Lipstadt's lawyers.
He was shown to have suppressed, altered and
doctored the truth to serve his own ends and his
reputation took a battering from which,
mercifully, it can never recover.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/07348-101747,00.html

20/03/2001

03/21/01 WED 19:37 FAX 4169230856

SCALES OF JUSTICE

003

[LC]

The Times

Fortunately for history, and the West, Hitchens has none of the cool mastery of facts required to support his ends. Hitchens has chosen Kissinger as a still vital survivor of the Cold War, a living reminder of our struggles, and sought to demonise him by laying at his door every conceivable abuse of human rights. Kissinger, and by extension the West, are held accountable for sins as varied as the genocide of Bangladeshis, the murder of Chilean generals, the deposing of Cypriot leaders and the sabotaging of Vietnamese peace talks. In Hitchens's account of the Cold War Kissinger lurks at the centre of every conspiracy, a malign intelligence directing world evil which might have leapt from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And yet Hitchens's allegations have been serialised with all solemnity by Harper's magazine in the United States and The Guardian here. That one of America's leading liberal magazines and Britain's pre-eminent left-wing broadsheet should be so eager to indulge Hitchens's revisionism tells us something about the appetite for denigration of their own countries among the West's leftish elites. It may seem amusing to play *Knock Down Ginger* with Dr Kissinger's reputation, ringing the leper's bell which peals "war criminal" and then running away. But the consequences are more malign than they appear to recognise. By placing Dr Kissinger in the dock, they collude in the attempt to let communism off the hook. They are, in Lipstadt's words, part of a growing assault on truth and memory.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard terms and conditions. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website.

20/03/2001

Questions re The Guardian, Part One (Feb 24)

1. As a matter of curiosity, do you recall ever attending a dinner at which Mr. Hitchens was also a guest?

2. Was the 1975 Senate intelligence committee that investigated matters surrounding the murder of Chilean Army Chief of Staff Gen. René Schneidner (and concluded, in essence, that US officials neither planned nor anticipated the murder) favourably disposed to the Nixon administration?

3. What gave the US administration reasonable confidence in October, 1970, that Chilean plotters had been effectively warned off a kidnapping attempt against Gen. Schneider? Conversely, had the administration lacked such confidence, what other options would have been available to it to stop the plotters?

4. Mr. Hitchens writes: "...a secret memorandum was declassified, giving excruciating details of a private conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in Santiago, Chile on June 8, 1976. The meeting took place a day before Kissinger was due to address the Organisation of American States (OAS). The subject was human rights. Kissinger was at pains to explain to Pinochet that the remarks he was to make on that topic were by no means to be taken seriously." Would you comment on this?

Questions re The Guardian, Part Two (Feb 26)

5. In the early 1970's, between independence, enosis, and partition, what, in the US administration's view, was most likely to lead to peaceful and just resolution in Cyprus, thereby serving the best interest of Cypriots themselves as well as the interests of the Western alliance?

6. Did the US administration have any reason to favour either a Greek-inspired coup or a Turkish invasion in Cyprus as a solution to the Cyprus question and for ensuring harmony within NATO?

["02/27/01 TUE 14:28 FAX", "→→→ KISSINGER", "002", "RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY & BIRTHPLACE FOUNDATION", "FEB 2 8 2001", "February 27, 2001", "BOARD OF DIRECTORS", "GEORGE I. ARGYROS,\nChairman", "ROBERT H. ARPLANALP", "CAROLINE I. AHMANSON", "WALTER H. ANNENBERG", "JOHN H. BARR,\nTreasurer", "DONALD L. BENDETTI,\nVice Chairman and Secretary", "TRICIA NIXON COX", "FREDERICK B. DENT", "JULIE NIXON EISENHOWER", "ROBERT F. ELLSWORTH", "GAVIN S. HERBERT", "KENNETH L. KHACHCIAN", "HENRY A. KISSINGER", "KATHERINE B. LOKER", "CYNTHIA H. MILLIGAN", "MARY MUTH", "PETER G. MUTH", "EDWARD NIXON", "MAUREEN DROWN NUNN", "HUBERT C. PERRY", "JOHN W. ROLLINS", "DIMITRI K. SIMES,\nPresident, The Nixon Center", "WILLIAM E. SIMON", "PETE WILSON", "JOHN H. TAYLOR,\nExecutive Director", "LOIF G. GAUNT,\nAssistant Secretary-Treasurer", "WILLIAM F. GRIFFIN,\nGeneral Counsel", "WILLIAM F. SIMON,\nFounding President", "To the Editor:", "As described in Reed Johnson's article this morning, the attacks by Christopher Hitchens and other yes-people for the Old Left prove that the best defense of their sordid ideological enthusiasms is a dirty offense. New scholarship suggests that by late 1972 the Nixon-Kissinger policy had transformed the Indochina war into a potentially winnable proposition for anti-communist regimes in Saigon and Cambodia. Then the Democratic Watergate Congress slashed aid to both governments while the Soviet Union dramatically increased its aid to communist forces. In April 1975, as Hanoi's and the Khmer Rouge's murders began there work, former Sen. William Fulbright said that he was no more depressed by Saigon's fall \"than I would be about Arkansas losing a football game to Texas.\" Eventually at least a million men, women, and children would be murdered by the communists in Cambodia and 600,000 lost in the South China Sea fleeing Vietnam's new communist government. Both the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam had attracted broad support from the U.S. antiwar movement.", "So Hitchens wants to try Dr. Kissinger for war crimes. Others might choose to call to account those former senators and U.S. representatives who with their votes intentionally caused American allies to run out of bullets, bringing on precisely the

FEB-28-2001 18:11

TELEGRAPH GROUP

Message of standing him down. The
leader of the memo speaks plainly of the
intention to "discourage him from acting
out," to "continue to encourage him to
clarify his planning" and to "encourage him
to join forces with other coup planners so
they may act in concert either before or
at 24 October" (italics added). The last
the stipulations are an entirely accurate,
to say prescient, description of what
ux actually did.

Consult again the cable received by
Henry Hecksher on October 20, referring to
ious queries "from high levels" about the
ness of the failed attacks on Schneider.
mas Karamessines, when questioned by
Senate Intelligence Committee about
cable, testified of his certainty that the
ids "high levels" referred directly to
singer. In all previous communications
to Washington, as a glance above will
be, that had indeed been the case. This on
own is enough to demolish Kissinger's
in to have "turned off" Track Two (and its
prior tracks) on October 15.

Ambassador Korry later made the
ous point that Kissinger was attempting
build a paper alibi in the event of a failure
the Viaux group. "His interest was not in
but in who was going to be blamed
what. He wanted me to be the one who
the heat. Henry didn't want to be
related with a failure and he was setting
record to blame the State Department.
rought me in to the President because
anted me to say what I had to say about
it; he wanted me to be the soft man."
the concept of "deniability" was not as
understood in Washington in 1970 as it
since become. But it is clear that Henry

However, Kissinger needed the crime very
slightly more than he needed, or was able to
design, the deniability. Without waiting for
his many hidden papers to be released or
subpoenaed, we can say with safety that he
is a man of integrity of direct collision in the
murder of a democratic officer in a deme-
ratic and peaceful country.

© Christopher Hitchens, 2001

Continued on Monday in our G2 section:
How Kissinger made himself an accomplice
in a plan of political assassination in Cyprus
which, when it went awry, led to the deaths
of thousands of civilians, the violent uproot-
ing of almost 2,000 refugees, and the cre-
ation of an unjust and unstable amputation
of Cyprus which still constitutes a serious
threat to peace today. The Guardian's sec-
ond and exclusive extract from Christopher
Hitchens's incendiary book.

02-28-01 18:03 TO:

FROM:

P04

In "The Case Against Henry Kissinger" (February) Christopher Hitchens says the President's National Bipartisan Commission on Central America was "staffed by Oliver North and [that it] whitewashed death-squad activity on the isthmus." I served on the Kissinger Commission, and can report that although its staff was large and competent, it did not include Oliver North. He simply coordinated security on the trips we made to Central America. He had nothing to do with the Commission's work or its report.

This is a comparatively minor howler. But Hitchens's remark about the death squads shows that he has not read the Commission's report.

This document repeatedly condemns death-squad activity in Central America, characterizing it as "designed to terrorize opponents, fight democracy, defend entrenched interests, and restore reactionary regimes. Whatever their aims, these methods are totally repugnant to the values of the United States." (p. 113)

The Report characterized the security forces in Guatemala thus: "In the cities they have murdered those even suspected of dissent. In the countryside, they have at times killed indiscriminately to repress any sign of support for the guerrillas. Such actions are morally unacceptable." (p. 119)
And again: "the United States cannot countenance the brutal alternative methods of counter-insurgency that wreak intolerable violence on the civilian population." (p. 120)

Given Hitchens's preposterous claim that the Commission "whitewashed" the death squads, who can put any credence in anything he says? One is reminded of the title he gave to one of his books: No One Left to Lie To.

And by Hitchens's bizarre definition of "war criminal," Henry Kissinger would have distinguished company in the dock: Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, along with any other national leader who has made responsible use of administrative authority.

Christopher Hitchens is an industrious writer, but on the evidence of this lurid and ill-informed piece, he is not one to be taken seriously.

John Silber

A nation
betrayed

In his explosive new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens argues that the former US secretary of state should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Here, in our second exclusive extract, he explains why Kissinger should be held responsible for the bloody invasion of Cyprus

in Years of Upheaval, the second volume of his trilogy of memoirs, Henry Kissinger found the subject of the 1974 Cyprus catastrophe so awkward that he decided to postpone consideration of it: "I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today."

In most of his writing about himself, Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him some self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

Kissinger now argues, in the long-delayed third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, that he was prevented and distracted, by Watergate and the meltdown of the Nixon presidency, from taking an interest in the crucial triangle of force between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. This is a bizarre disclaimer: the proximity of Cyprus to the Middle East was a factor never absent from US strategic thinking, and there was no reason of domestic policy to prevent the region from engaging his attention. Furthermore, the very implosion of Nixonian authority, cited as a reason for Kissinger's absence of mind, in fact bestowed extraordinary powers upon him.

When he became secretary of state in 1973, Kissinger took care to retain his post as special assistant to the president for national security affairs, or national security adviser. This made him the first and only secretary of state to hold the chairmanship of the elite and secretive Forty Committee, which considered and approved covert actions by the CIA. Meanwhile, as chairman of the National Security Council, he held a position where every important intelligence plan passed across his desk. His former NSC aide, Roger Morris, was not exaggerating by much, if at all, when he said that Kissinger's dual position, plus Nixon's eroded status, made him "no less

than acting chief of state for national security".

Kissinger gives one hostage to fortune in Years of Upheaval and another in Years of Renewal. In the former, he says plainly: "I had always taken it for granted that the next inter-communal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention." That is, it would at least risk the prospect of a war within Nato between Greece and Turkey, and would certainly involve the partition of the island. That this was common knowledge may not be doubted by any person even lightly acquainted with Cypriot affairs. In the latter volume, Kissinger repeatedly asks the reader why anyone (such as himself, so burdened with Watergate) would have sought "a crisis in the eastern Mediterranean between two Nato allies".

"These two disingenuous statements need to be qualified in the light of a third, which appears on page 199 of Years of Renewal. Here, President Makarios of Cyprus is described without adorn-ment as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus's tensions". Makarios was the democratically elected leader of a virtually unarmed republic. His rule was challenged, and the independence of Cyprus was threatened, by a military dicta-torship in Athens and a highly militarised government in Turkey, both of which sponsored rightwing gangster organisations on the island, and both of which had plans to annex the greater or lesser part of it. Several attempts had been made on Makarios's life. To describe him as "the proximate cause" of the tensions is to make a wildly aberrant moral judgment.

This same judgment, however, supplies the key that unlocks the lie at the heart of Kissinger's presentation. If the elected civilian authority (and spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox community) is the "proximate cause" of the tensions, then his removal from the scene is self-evidently the cure for them. If one can demonstrate that there was such a removal plan, and that Kissinger knew about it in advance, then it follows logically that he was not ostensibly looking for a crisis - as he self-pityingly asks us to disbelieve - but for a solution. The fact that he got a crisis, which was also a hideous calamity for the region, does not change the equation. It is attributable to the other observable fact that the scheme to remove Makarios, on which the "solution" depended, was in practice a failure.

Friend or foe? ... Kissinger with Makarios, the deposed Cypriot president, during his visit to the US. Above: Turkish paratroops descend on Nicosia in July 1974

But those who willled the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

It is, from Kissinger's own record, as well as from the record of the subsequent official inquiry, easy to demonstrate that he did have advance knowledge of the plan to depose Makarios. He admits as much himself, by noting that the Greek dictator Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the secret police, was determined to mount a coup in Cyprus and bring the island under the control of Athens. This was one of the better-known facts of the situation, as was the more embarrassing fact that Brigadier Ioannides was dependent on US military aid and political sympathy. His police state had been expelled from the Council of Europe and blocked from joining the REC, and it was largely the advantage conferred by his agreement to "home port" the US Sixth Fleet, and host a string of US air and intelligence bases, that kept him in power. This policy was highly controversial in Congress and in the American press, and the argument over it was part of Kissinger's daily bread long before Watergate.

Thus it was understood in general that the Greek dictatorship, a US client, wished to see Makarios overthrown and had already tried to have him killed. (Overthrow and assassination, incidentally, are effectively coterminous in this account; there was no possibility of leaving such a charismatic leader alive, and those who sought his removal invariably intended his death.) This was also understood in particular. The most salient proof is this. In May 1974, two months before the coup in Nicosia, which Kissinger later John F. Kennedy, he received a memorandum from the head of his state department Cyprus desk, Thomas Boyatt. Boyatt summarised the reasons for believing that a Greek junta attack on Cyprus was imminent. He further argued that, in the absence of a US representation to Athens, warning the dictators to desist, it might be assumed that the United States was indifferent to this. And he added what everybody knew - that such a coup, if it went forward, would beyond doubt trigger a Turkish invasion.

Present memos are a dime a dozen in Washington after a crisis; they are often then read for the first time, or leaked to the press or Congress. But Kissinger now admits that he saw

His decision to do
nothing was therefore
a direct decision to do
something, or to let
something be done

this document in real time, while engaged in his shuttle between Syria and Israel (both of them within half an hour's flying time of Cyprus). Yet no démarche bearing his name or carrying his authority was issued to the Greek junta.

A short while afterwards, Kissinger received a call from Senator J William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. Senator Fulbright had been briefed about the impending coup by a senior Greek dissident journalist in Washington named Elias P Demetracopoulos. He told Kissinger that steps should be taken to avert the planned Greek action, and he gave three reasons. The first was that it would repair some of the moral damage done by the US governments indulgence of the junta. The second was that it would head off a confrontation between-Greece and Turkey in the Mediterranean. The third was that it would enhance US prestige on the island. Kissinger declined to take the recommended steps, on the bizarre grounds that he could not intervene in Greek "internal affairs" at a time when the Nixon administration was resisting pressure from Senator Henry Jackson to link US-Soviet trade to the free emigration of Russian Jewry. However odd this line of argument, it still makes it impossible for Kissinger to claim, as he still does, that he had no warning.

So there was still no high-level US concern registered with Athens. The difficulty is sometimes presented as one of protocol or etiquette, as if Kissinger's regular custom was to whisper and tread lightly. But again I remind you that Henry Kissinger, in addition to his formal diplomatic eminence, was also head of the Forty Committee, and supervisor of covert action, and was dealing in private with an Athens regime that had long-standing CIA ties. Boyatt's memoranda, warning of what was to happen, were classified as secret and have still never been released. Asked to testify to a Congressional hearing, he was at first forbidden by Kissinger to appear. He was only finally permitted to do so in order that he might avoid a citation for contempt. His evidence was taken in "excutive session", with the hearing room cleared of staff, reporters and visitors.

Events continued to gather pace. On July 1 1974, three senior officials of the Greek foreign ministry, all known for their moderate views on the Cyprus question, publicly tendered their resignations. On July 3, President Makarios made public an open letter to the Greek junta, which made the direct accusation of foreign interference and subversion. He called page 8>

A nation
betrayed

page 7 for the withdrawal from Cyprus of the
officers responsible.

Some days after the coup, which eventually occurred on July 15 1974, when challenged at a press conference about his apparent failure to foresee or avert it, Kissinger replied that "the information was not lying around in the streets". Actually, it almost was in the streets. But more importantly, it had been available to him round the clock, in both his diplomatic and his intelligence capacities. His decision to do nothing was therefore a direct decision to do something, or to let something be done.

To the rest of the world, two things were obvious about the coup. The first was that it had been instigated from Athens and carried out with the help of regular Greek forces, and was thus a direct intervention in the internal affairs of one country by another. The second was that it violated all the existing treaties governing the status of Cyprus. The obvious and unsavoury illegality was hyridly emphasised by the junta itself, which chose a notorious chauvinist gunman named Nicos Sampson to be its proxy "president". Sampson must have been well known to the chairmam of the Forty Committee as a long-standing recipient of financial support from the CIA; he also received money for his fanatical Nicosia newspaper Makhi (Combat) from a pro-junta CIA proxy in Athens, Savvas Constantopoulos, the publisher of the pro-junta organ Eleftheros Kosmos (Free World). No European government treated Sampson as anything but a pariah, for the brief nine days in which he held power and launched a campaign of murder against his democratic Greek opponents. But Kissinger told the US envoy in Nicosia to receive Sampson's "foreign minister" as foreign minister, thus making the United States the first and only government to extend de facto recognition.

(At this point, it might be emphasised, the
whereabouts of Makarios were unknown. His
place had been shelled and his death
announced on the junta's radio. He had in fact
made his escape, and was able to broadcast the
fact a few days afterwards - to the irritation of
certain well-placed persons.) In his 1986
memoir The Truth, published in Athens in
1986, the then head of the Greek armed forces,
General Grigorios Bonanos, records that
the junta's attack on Cyprus brought a
message of approval and support, delivered to
its intelligence service by no less a man
than Thomas A Pappas - the chosen interme-
dary between the junta and the Nixon-
Kissinger administration.

In Washington, Kissinger's press spokesman Robert Anderson flatly denied that the coup - later described by Makarios from the podium of the United Nations as "an invasion" - constituted foreign intervention. "No," he replied to a direct question on this point. "In our view there has been no outside intervention." This surreal position was not contradicted by Kissinger when he met with the ambassador of Cyprus and failed to offer the customary condolences on the reported death of his president - the "proximate cause", we now learn from him, of all the unpleasantness. When asked if he still recognised the elected Makarios government as the legal one, Kissinger doggedly and astonishingly refused to answer. When asked if the United States was moving towards recognition of the Sampson regime, his spokesman finally to deny it. When Makarios came to Washington on July 22, the state department was asked whether he would be received by Kissinger "as a private citizen, as Archbishop, or as President of Cyprus?" The answer? "He [Kissinger] is meeting with Archbishop Makarios on Monday." Every other government in the world, save the collapsing Greek dictatorship, recognised Makarios as the legitimate head of the Cyprus republic. Kissinger's unilateralism on the point is without diplomatic precedent, and argues strongly for his collusion and sympathy with the armed handful of thugs who felt the same way.

It is worth emphasising that Makarios was

invited to Washington in the first place, as
elected and legal president of Cyprus, by Sena-
tor J William Fulbright of the Senate foreign
relations committee, and by his counterpart
Congressman Thomas Morgan, chairman of
the house foreign affairs committee. Credit for
this invitation belongs to Elias Demetracopoulos,
the Washington-based dissident journalist,
who had long warned of the coup. He it was
who conveyed the invitation to Makarios, who
was then in London meeting the British foreign
secretary. This initiative crowned a series of
anti-junta activities by this journalist, who had
already profoundly irritated Kissinger and become a special object of his spite. At the very last
moment, and with very poor grace, Kissinger
was compelled to announce that he was receiving
Makarios in his presidential and not his
episcopal capacity.

Since Kissinger himself tells us that he had always known or assumed that another outbreak of violence in Cyprus would trigger a Turkish military intervention, we can assume in our turn that he was not surprised when such an intervention came. Nor does he seem to have been very much disconcerted. While the Greek junta remained in power, his efforts were principally directed to shielding it from retaliation. He was opposed to the return of Makarios to the island, and strongly opposed to Turkish or British use of force (Britain being a guarantor power with a treaty obligation and troops in place on Cyprus) to undo the Greek coup. This same counsel of inerrnia or inaction - amply textified to in his own memoirs - translated later into strict and repeated admonitions against any measures to block a Turkish invasion. Sir Tom McNally, then

A good liar must have
a good memory:
Kissinger is a
stupendous liar with
a remarkable memory

the chief political adviser to Britain's then foreign secretary and future prime minister, James Callaghan, has since disclosed that Kissinger "vetoed" at least one British military action to pre-empt a Turkish landing.

This may seem paradoxical, but the long-standing sympathy for a partition of Cyprus, repeatedly expressed by the state and defence departments, makes it seem much less so. The demographic composition of the island (82% Greek to 18% Turkish) made it more logical for the partition to be imposed by Greece. But a second-best was to have it imposed by Turkey. And, once Turkey had conducted two brutal invasions and occupied almost 40% of Cyprus, the territory, Kissinger exerted himself very strongly to protect Ankara from any congressional reprisal for this outright violation of international law, and promiscuous and illegal misuse of US weaponry. He became so pro-Turkish, indeed, that it was as if he had never heard of the Greek colonels. (Though his expressed dislike of the returned Greek democratic leaders supplied an occasional reminder.)

Not all the elements of this partitionist policy can be charged to Kissinger personally; he inherited the Greek junta and the official dislike of Makarios. However, even in the dank obfuscatory prose of his own memoirs, he does admit what can otherwise be concluded from independent sources. Using covert channels, and short-circuiting the democratic process in his own country, he made himself an accomplice in a plan of political assassination which, when it went awry, led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, the violent uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees, and the creation of an unjust and unstable amputation of Cyprus which constitutes a serious threat to peace a full quarter-century later. On July 10 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights adopted a report, prepared by 18 distinguished jurists and chaired by Professor JES Pawaett, resulting from a year's research into the consequences of the Turkish invasion. It found that the Turkish army had engaged in the deliberate killing of civilians, in the execution of prisoners, in the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, in the arbitrary

The aftermath... the bodies of Greek Cypriots shot by invading Turkish troops outside Kyrenia; a Greek Cypriot family weep for their missing men after the Turkish invasion; Dimitrios Ioannides, head of the Greek secret service

punishment and detention of civilians, and in systematic acts of rape, torture, and looting. A large number of "disappeared" persons, both prisoners of war and civilians, are still "missing" from this period. They include a dozen holders of US passports, which is evidence in itself of an indiscriminate strategy, when conducted by an army dependent on US aid and materiel.

Perhaps it was a reluctance to accept his responsibility for these outrages, as well as his responsibility for the original coup, that led Kissinger to tell a bizarre sequence of lies to his new friends the Chinese. On October 2 1974, he held a high-level meeting in New York with Qiao Guanhua, vice-foreign minister of the People's Republic. It was the first substantive Sino-American meeting since the visit of Deng Xiaoping, and the first order of business was Cyprus. The memorandum, which is headed "Top secret/sensitive/exclusively eyes only", has Kissinger first rejecting China's public claim that he had helped engineer the removal of Makarios. "We did not. We did not oppose Makarios." (This claim is directly belied by his own memoirs.) He says: "When the coup occurred I was in Moscow", which he was not. He says: "My people did not take these intelligence reports [concerning an impending coup] seriously," even though they had. He says that neither did Makarios take them seriously, even though Makarios had publicly denounced the Athens junta for its coup plans. Kissinger then makes the amazing claim: "We knew the Soviets had told the Turks to invade", which would make this the first Soviet-instigated invasion to be conducted by a Nato army and paid for with US aid.

A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. So perhaps some of this hysterical lying is explained by its context - by the need to enlist China's anti-Soviet instinets. But the total of falsity is so impressive that it suggests something additional, something more like denial or delusion, or even a confession by other means.

Extracted from The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, to be published by Verso, price £15, in May.
© Christopher Hitchens.

2

On December 2, 1998, Mr Michael Korda was being interviewed on camera in his office at Simon & Schuster. As one of the reigning magnates of New York publishing, he had edited and "produced" the work of authors as various as Tennessee Williams, Richard Nixon and Joan Crawford. On this particular day, he was talking about the life and thoughts of the singer Cher, whose portrait adorned the wall behind him. And then the telephone rang and there was a message to call "Dr" Henry Kissinger as soon as possible. A polymath like Mr Korda knows — what with the exigencies of publishing in these vertiginous days — how to switch in an instant between Cher and high statecraft. The camera kept running, and recorded the following scene for a tape which I possess.

Asking his secretary to get the number (759 7919 — the digits of Kissinger Associates), Mr Korda quips drily, to general laughter in the office, that it "should be 1-800-cambodia... 1-800-bomb-cambodia". After a pause of nicely calibrated duration (no senior editor likes to be put on hold while he's receiving company, especially media company), it's "Henry — Hi, how are you?... You're getting ill the publicity you could want in the New York Times, but not the kind you want... I also think it's very, very dubious for the administration to simply say yes, they'll release these papers... no... no, absolutely... no... no... well, hmmm, yeah. We did it until quite recently, frankly, and he did prevail... Well, I don't

think there's any question about that, as uncomfortable as it may be... Henry, this is totally outrageous... yeah... Also the jurisdiction. This is a Spanish judge appearing to an English court about a Chilean head of state. So it's, it... Also Spain has no rational jurisdiction over events in Chile anyway so that makes absolutely no sense... Well, that's probably true... If you would. I think that would be by far and away the best... Right, yeah, no I think it's exactly what you should do and I think it should be long and I think it should end with your father's letter. I think it's a very important document... Yes, but I think the letter is wonderful, and central to the entire book. Can you let me read the Lebanon chapter over the weekend?" At this point the conversation ends, with some jocular observations by Mr Korda about his upcoming colonoscopy: "a totally repulsive procedure".

By means of the same tiny internal camera, or its forensic equivalent, one could deduce not a little about the world of Henry Kissinger from this microcosmic exchange. The first and most important thing is this. Sitting in his office at Kissinger Associates, with its tentacles of business and consultancy stretching from Belgrade to Beijing, and cushioned by innumerable other directorships and boards, he still shudders when he hears of the arrest of a dictator. Syncopated the conversation with Mr Korda may be, but it's clear that the keyword is "jurisdiction". What had the New York Times been reporting that fine morning? On that December 2, 1998, its front page carried the following →

report from Tim Weiner, the paper's national security correspondent in Washington. Under the headline "US Will Release Files On Crimes Under Pinochet", he wrote:

Tending into a political and diplomatic confrontation it tried to avoid, the United States decided today to declassify some secret documents on the killings and torture committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile... The decision to release such documents is the first sign that the United States will cooperate in the case against General Pinochet. Clinton Administration officials said they believed the benefits of openness in human rights cases outweighed the risks to national security in this case.

But the decision could open "a can of worms", in the words of a former Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] official stationed in Chile, exposing the depth of the knowledge that the United States had about crimes charged against the Pinochet government...

While some European government officials have supported bringing the former dictator to court, United States officials have stayed largely silent, reflecting skepticism about the Spanish court's power, doubts about international tribunals aimed at former foreign rulers, and worries over the implications for American leaders who might someday also be accused in foreign countries. [italics added]

President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, who served as his national security advisor and Secretary of State, supported a right-wing coup in Chile in the early 1970s, previously declassified documents show.

But many of the actions of the United States during the 1973 coup, and much of what American leaders and intelligence services did in liaison with the Pinochet government after it seized power, remain under the seal of national security. The secret files on the Pinochet regime are held by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the National Archives, the Presidential libraries of Gerhard R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, and other government agencies.

According to Justice Department records, these files contain a history of human rights abuses and international terrorism:

* In 1975 State Department officials in Chile protested the Pinochet regime's record of killing and torture, filing dissents to American foreign policy with their superiors in Washington.

* The CIA has files on assassinations by the regime and the Chilean secret police. The intelligence agency also has records on Chile's attempts to establish an international right-wing covert-action squad.

* The Ford Library contains many of Mr Kissinger's secret files on Chile, which have never been made public. Through a secrecy, Mr Kissinger declined a request for an interview today.

One must credit Kissinger with grasping what so many other people did not: that if the Pinochet precedent became established,

then he himself was in some danger. The United States believes that it alone pursues and indicts war criminals and "international terrorists"; nothing in its political or journalistic culture yet allows for the thought that it might be lurbouring and sheltering such a senior one. Yet the thought had very obliquely surfaced in Mr Weiner's story, and Kissinger was a worried man when he called his editor that day to discuss a memoir (eventually published under the unbearably dull and self-regarding title Years Of Renewal) that was still in progress.

"Harbouring and sheltering", though, are understatements for the lavishness of Henry Kissinger's circumstances. His advice is sought, at $25,000 an appearance, by audiences of businessmen and academics and policymakers. His turgid newspaper column is syndicated by the Los Angeles Times. His first volume of memoirs was part written and also edited by Harold Evans, who with Tina Brown is among the many hosts and hostesses who solicit Kissinger's company, or perhaps, one should say, society, for those telling New York soirées. At different times, he has been a consultant to ABC News and CBS; his most successful diplomacy, indeed, has probably been conducted with the media (and his single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him "Doctor"). Pawned on by Ted Koppel, sought out by corporations and despots with "image" problems or "failures of communication", and given respectful attention by presidential candidates and those whose task it is to "mould" their global vision, this

man wants for little in the pathetic universe that the "self-esteem" industry exists to serve. Of whom else would Norman Podhoretz write, in a bended-knee encomium to Years Of Upheaval:

What we have here is writing of the very highest order. It is writing that is equally at ease in portrature and abstract analysis; that can shape a narrative as skillfully as it can paint a scene; that can achieve marvels of compression while moving at an expansive and leisurely pace. It is writing that can shift without strain or falsity of tone from the gravitas befitting a book about great historical events to the humor and irony dictated by an unfailing sense of human proportion.

A critic who can suck like that, as was once duly said by one of my moral tutors, need never dine alone. And nor need his subject. Except that, every now and then, the recipient (and donor) of so much sycophancy feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom. Is it perhaps another disclosure on a newly released Nixon tape? Some stray news from Indonesia, portending the fall or imprisonment of another patron (and perhaps the escape of an awkward document or two)? The arrest or indictment of a torturer or assassin the expiry of the statute of secrecy for some obscure cabinet papers in a faraway country — any one of these can instantly spoil his day. As we see from the Korda tape, Kissinger →

cannot open the morning paper with the assurance of tranquillity. Because he knows what others can only suspect, or guess at. He knows. And he is a prisoner of the knowledge as, to some extent, are we.

Notice the likeable way in which Mr Korda demonstrates his broadmindedness with the Cambodia jest. Everybody "knows", after all, that Kissinger inflicted terror and misery and mass death on that country, and great injury to the United States Constitution at the same time. (Everybody also "knows" that other vulnerable nations can lay claim to the same melancholy and hateful distinction, with incremental or "collateral" damage to American democracy keeping pace.) Yet the pudgy man standing in black tie at the Vogue party is not, surely, the man who ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and cleries who got in his way? Oh, but he is. It's exactly the same man.

And that may be among the most nauseating reflections of all. Kissinger is not invited and feted because of his exquisite manners or his mordant wit (his manners are in any case rather gross, and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and second-hand darts). No, he is sought after because his presence supplies a risson: the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power. There's a slight guilty nervousness on the edge of Mr Korda's gag about the indescribable sufferings of Indochina. And I've noticed, time and again standing at the back

of the audience during Kissinger speeches, that laughter of the nervous, uneasy kind is the sort of laughter he likes to provoke. In exacting this tribute, he flaunts not the "aphrodisiac" of power (another of his planiarised bons mots) but its pornography.

In a famous expression of his contempt for democracy, Kissinger once observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go Marxist" merely because "its people are irresponsible". The country concerned was Chile, which at the time of this remark had a justified reputation as the most highly evolved pluralistic democracy in the southern hemisphere of the Americas. The pluralism translated, in the years of the Cold War, into an electorate that voted about one-third conservative, one-third socialist and communist, and one-third Christian Democratic and centrist. This had made it relatively easy to keep the Marxist element from having its turn in government, and ever since 1962 the CIA had — as it had in Italy and other comparable nations — largely contented itself with funding the reliable elements.

In September 1970, however, the Left's candidate actually gained a slight plurality of 36.2% in the presidential elections. Divisions on the Right, and the adherence of some smaller radical and Christian parties to the Left, made it a moral certainty that the Chilean Congress would, after the traditional 60-day interregnum, confirm Dr Salvador Allende as the next president. But the very name of Allende was anathema to the extreme Right in Chile, to certain powerful corporations (notably ITT, Pepsi

Cola and the Chase Manhattan Bank) which did business in Chile and the United States, and to the CIA.

This loathing quickly communicated itself to President Nixon. He was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the president of Pepsi Cola, who had given him his first corporate account when, as a young lawyer, he had joined John Mitchell's New York firm. A series of Washington meetings, held within 11 days of Allende's electoral victory, essentially settled the fate of Chilean democracy. After discussions with interested parties, and with CIA director Richard Helms, Kissinger went with Helms to the Oval Office. Helms's notes of the meeting show that Nixon wasted little breath in making his wishes known. Allende was not to assume office. "Not concerned risks involved. No involvement of embassy. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. Full-time job — best men we have... Make the economy scream. 48 hours for plan of action."

D classified documents show that Kissinger — who had previously neither known nor cared about Chile, describing it offhandedly as "a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica" — took seriously this chance to impress his boss. A group was set up in Langley, Virginia, with the express purpose of running a "two track" policy for Chile: one the ostensible diplomatic one and the other — unknown to the State Department or the US ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry — a strategy of destabilisation,

kidnap and assassination, designed to provoke a military coup.

There were long- and short-term obstacles to the incubation of such an intervention, especially in the brief interval available before Allende took his oath of office. The long-term obstacle was the tradition of military abstention from politics in Chile, a tradition which marked off the country from its neighbours. Such a military culture was not to be degraded overnight. The short-term obstacle lay in the person of one man — General René Schneider. As chief of the Chilean General Staff, he was adamantly opposed to any military meddling in the electoral process. Accordingly, it was decided at a meeting on September 18, 1970, that General Schneider had to go.

The plan was to have him kidnapped by extremist officers, in such a way as to make it appear that leftist and pro-Allende elements were behind the plot. The resulting confusion, it was hoped, would panic the Chilean Congress into denying Allende the presidency. A sum of $50,000 was offered around the Chilean capital, Santiago, for any officer or officers enterprising enough to take on this task. Richard Helms and his director of covert operations, Thomas Karmessines, told Kissinger that they were not optimistic. Military circles were hesitant and divided, or else loyal to General Schneider and the Chilean constitution. As Helms put it in a later account of the conversation, "We tried to make clear to Kissinger how small the possibility of success was." Kissinger firmly told Helms

5

and Karamessines to press on in any case.

Here one must pause for a recapitulation. An unelected official in the United States is meeting with others, without the knowledge or authorisation of Congress, to plan the kidnapping of a constitution-minded senior officer in a democratic country with which the United States is not at war, and with which it maintains cordial diplomatic relations. The minutes of the meetings may have an official look to them (though they were hidden from the light of day for long enough) but what we are reviewing is a "hit" — a piece of state-supported terrorism.

Ambassador Korry has testified that he told his embassy staff to have nothing to do with a group styling itself Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Freedom), a quasi-fascist group intent on defying the election results. He sent three cables to Washington warning his superiors to have nothing to do with them either. He was unaware that his own military attaches had been told to contact the group and keep the fact from him. And when the outgoing president of Chile, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, announced that he was opposed to any US intervention and would vote to confirm the legally elected Allende, it was precisely to this gang that Kissinger turned.

On October 15, 1970, Kissinger was told of an extremist right-wing officer named General Roberto Viazu, who had ties to Patria y Libertad and who was willing to

accept the secret US commission to remove General Schneider from the chessboard. The term "kidnap" was still being employed at this point, and is often employed still. However, Kissinger's 'Track Two group authorised the supply of machine guns as well as tear gas grenades to Viazu's associates, and never seems to have asked what they would do with the general once they had kidnapped him.

Let the documents tell the story. A CIA cable to Kissinger's 'Track Two group from Santiago dated October 18, 1970, reads (with the names still blacked out for "security" purposes and cover identities written in by hand — in my square brackets — by the ever-thoughtful redaction service):

1. [Station cooptee] met clandestinely evening 17 Oct with [two Chilean armed forces officers] who told him their plans were moving along better than had thought possible. They asked that by evening 18 Oct [cooptee] arrange furnish them with eight to ten tear gas grenades. Within 48 hours they need three 45 calibre machine guns ("grease guns") with 500 rounds ammo each. [One officer] commented has three machine guns himself but can be identified by serial numbers as having been issued to him therefore unable use them.

2. [Officers] said they have to move because they believe they now under suspicion and being watched by Allende supporters. [One officer] was late to meeting having taken evasive action to shuke possible surveillance by one or two taxi cabs with dual antennas which he believed being used by opposition against him.

3. [Cooptee] asked if [officers] had Air Force contacts. 'They answered they did not but would welcome one. [Cooptee] separately has since tried contact [a Chilean Air Force General] and will keep trying until established. Will urge [Air Force General] meet with [other two officers] a.s.a.p. [Cooptee] commented to station that [Air Force General] has not tried contact him since ref a talk.

4. [Cooptee] comment: cannot tell who is leader of this movement but strongly suspects it is Admiral [Deleted]. It would appear from [his contact's] actions and alleged Allende suspicions about them that unless they act now they are lost. Trying get more info from them evening 18 Oct about support they believe they have.

5. Station plans give six tear gas grenades (arriving noon 18 Oct by special courier) to [cooptee] for delivery to [armed forces officers] instead of having [false flag officer] deliver them to Viazu group. Our reasoning is that [cooptee] dealing with active duty officers. Also [false flag officer] leaving evening 18 Oct and will not be replaced but [cooptee] will stay here. Hence important that [cooptee] credibility with [armed forces officers] be strengthened by prompt delivery what they requesting. Request headquarters agreement by 1500 hours local time 18 Oct on decision delivery of tear gas to [cooptee] vice [false flag officer].

6. Request prompt shipment three sterile 45 calibre machine guns and ammo per para 1 above, by special courier if necessary. Please confirm by 2000 hours local time 18 Oct that this can be done so [cooptee] may inform his contacts accordingly.

The reply, which is headed "Immediate Santiago (Eyes Only [Deleted.])" is dated October 18 and reads:

Sub-machine guns and ammo being sent by regular [deleted] courier leaving Washington 0700 hours 19 October due arrive Santiago late evening 20 October or early morning 21 October. Preferred use regular [deleted] courier to avoid bringing undue attention to op.

A companion message, also addressed to "Santiago 562", went like this:

1. Depending how [cooptee] conversation goes evening 18 October you may wish submit Intel report [deleted] so we can decide whether should be disseminated.

2. New subject. If [cooptee] plans lead coup, or be actively and publicly involved, we puzzled why it should bother him if machine guns can be traced to him. Can we develop rationale on why guns must be sterile? Will continue make effort provide them but find our credulity stretched by Navy [officer] leading his troops with sterile guns? What is special purpose for these guns? We will try send them whether you can provide explanation or not.

The full beauty of this cable traffic cannot be fully appreciated without a reading of another message, dated October 16. (It should, however, be borne in mind that the Chilean Congress was to meet to confirm Dr Salvador Allende as president on the 24th of that month →

1. [Deleted/handwritten code name Trickturn] policy, objectives and actions were reviewed at high USG [United States Government] level afternoon 15 October. Conclusions, which are to be your operational guide, follow:

2. It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden. [italics added] While this imposes on us a high degree of selectivity in making military contacts and dictates that these contacts be made in the most secure manner it definitely does not preclude contacts such as reported in Santiago 5-14 which was a masterful piece of work.

3. After the most careful consideration it was determined that a Viaux coup attempt carried out by him alone with the forces now at his disposal would fail. Thus, it would be counterproductive to our [deleted; handwritten insert "Track Two"] objectives. It was decided that [deleted; handwritten insert "CIA"] get a message to Viaux warning him against precipitate action. In essence our message is to state, "We have reviewed your plans, and based on your information and ours, we come to the conclusion that your plans for a coup at this time cannot succeed. Failing they may reduce your capabilities for

the future. Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you together with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support." You are requested to deliver the message to Viaux essentially as noted above. Our objectives are as follows: (A) To advise him of our opinion and discourage him from acting alone; (B) Continue to encourage him to amplify his planning; (C) Encourage him to join forces with other coup planners so that they may act in concert either before or after 24 October. (N. II. Six gas masks and six CS canisters [sic] are being carried to Santiago by special [deleted] courier RTD Washington 1100 hours 16 October.)

4. There is great and continuing interest in the activities of Tirado, Cанны, Valenzuela and we wish them maximum good fortune.

5. The above is your operating guidance. No other policy guidance you may receive from [indecipherable: State?] or its maximum exponent in Santiago, on his return, are to sway you from your course.

6. Please review all your present and possibly new activities to include propaganda, black operations, surfacing of intelligence or disinformation, personal contacts, or anything else your imagination can conjure which will permit you to press forward our [deleted] objective in a secure manner.

Finally, it is essential to read the White House "memorandum of conversation", dated October 15, 1970, to which the above cable directly refers and of which it is a more honest summary. Present for the "high USG

level" meeting were, as noted in the heading: "Dr Kissinger, Mr Karamessines, Gen Haig." The first paragraph of their deliberations has been entirely blacked out, with not so much as a scribble in the margin from the reduction service. (Given what has since been admitted, this 20-line deletion must be well worth reading.) Picking up at paragraph two, we find the following:

2. Then Mr Karamessines provided a run-down on Viaux, the Cанны meeting with Tirado, the latter's new position [after Porta was relieved of command "for health reasons"] and, in some detail, the general situation in Chile from the coup possibility viewpoint.

3. A certain amount of information was available to us concerning Viaux's alleged support throughout the Chilean military. We had assessed Viaux's claims carefully, basing our analysis on good intelligence from a number of sources. Our conclusion was clear: Viaux did not have more than one chance in 20 — perhaps less — to launch a successful coup.

4. The unfortunate reperceptions, in Chile and internationally, of an unsuccessful coup were discussed. Dr Kissinger ticked off his list of these negative possibilities. His items were remarkably similar to the ones Mr Karamessines had prepared.

5. It was decided by those present that the Agency must get a message to Viaux warning him against any precipitate action. In essence our message was to state: "We have reviewed your plans, and based on your information and ours, we come to the conclusion that your plans for a coup at this time cannot succeed.

Failing, they may reduce your capabilities for the future. Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support."

6. After the decision to de-fuse the Viaux coup plot, at least temporarily, Dr Kissinger instructed Mr Karamessines to preserve Agency assets in Chile, working clandestinely and securely to maintain the capability for Agency operations against Allende in the future.

7. Dr Kissinger discussed his desire that the word of our encouragement to the Chilean military in recent weeks be kept as secret as possible. Mr Karamessines stated emphatically that we had been doing everything possible in this connection, including the use of false flag officers, car meetings and every conceivable precaution. But we and others had done a great deal of talking recently with a number of persons. For example, Ambassador Korry's wideranging discussions with numerous people urging a coup "cannot be put back into the bottle." [Three lines of deletion follow.] [Dr Kissinger requested that copy of the message be sent to him on 16 October.]

The meeting concluded on Dr Kissinger's note that the Agency should continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot in sight: now, after October 24, after November 5, and into the future until such time as new marching orders are given. Mr Karamessines stated that the Agency would comply.

So "Track Two" contained two tracks of its own. Track Two/One was the group of →

ultras led by General Viaux and his sidekick Captain Arturo Marshal. These men had tried to bring off a coup in 1969 against the Christian Democrats; they had been cashiered and were disliked even by conservatives in the officer corps. "Track 'Two'/"Two" was a more ostensibly "respectable" faction headed by General Camilo Valenzuela, the chief of the garrison in the capital city, whose name occurs in the cables above and whose identity is concealed by some of the deletions. Several of the CIA operatives in Chile felt that Viaux was too much of a mad-dog to be trusted. And Ambassador Korry's repeated admonitions also had their effect.

As shown in the October 15 memo cited above, Kissinger and Karamessines developed last-minute second thoughts about Viaux, who as late as October 13 had been given $20,000 in cash from the CIA station and promised a life insurance policy of $250,000. This offer was authorised direct from the White House. However, with only days to go before Allende was inaugurated, and with Nixon repeating that "it was absolutely essential that the election of Mr Allende to the Presidency be thwarted", the pressure on the Valenzuela group became intense. As a direct consequence, especially after the warm words of encouragement he had been given, General Viaux felt himself under some obligation to deliver also, and to disprove those who had doubted him.

On the evening of October 19, 1970,

## OPERATION CONDOR

This was a machinery of cross-border assassination, abduction, torture and intimidation, coordinated between the secret police forces of Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay, Videla's Argentina and other regional caucados. It is now known to have been responsible, to name only the most salient victims, for the murder of the dissident general Carlos Prats of Chile (and his wife) in Buenos Aires, the murder of the Bolivian general Juan Jose Torres, and the maiming of a Chilean Christian Democrat senator, Bernardo Leighton, in Italy. US government complicity has been uncovered at every level of this network. It has been established, for example, that the FBI aided Pinochet in capturing Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarcón, who was detained and tortured in Paraguay, then turned over to the Chilean secret police, and 'disappeared'. Astonishingly, the surveillance of Latin US dissident refugees in the United States was promised to Condor figures by US intelligence.

These and other facts have been established by the work of 'truth and reconciliation' commissions set up by post-dictatorship forces in the countries of the southern hemisphere. Stroessner has been overthrown, Videla is in prison, Pinochet and his henchmen are being, or have been, brought to account in Chile. The US has not so far found it convenient to establish such a commission of its own.

All of the above-cited crimes, and many more besides, were conniethyl'ed on Kissinger's 'watch' as Secretary of State. And all of them were, and are, punishable, under local or international law, or both. It can hardly be argued, by himself or by his

defenders, that he was indifferent to, or unaware of, the true situation. In 1999, a secret memorandum was declassified, giving excruciating details of a private conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, on June 8, 1976. The meeting took place the day before Kissinger was due to address the Organisation of American States (OAS). The subject was human rights. Kissinger was at pains to explain to Pinochet that the remarks he was to make on that topic were by no means to be taken seriously. My friend Peter Kornbluh has performed the service of comparing the 'Memcon' (Memorandum of Conversation) with the account of the meeting given by Kissinger himself in his third volume of apologia, Years Of Renewal! The Memoir 'A considerable amount of time in my dialogue with Pinochet was devoted to human rights, which were, in fact, the principal obstacle to close United States relations with Chile. I outlined the main points in my speech to the OAS which I would deliver the next day. Pinochet made no comment.'

The Memcon 'I will treat human rights in general terms, and human rights in a world context. I will refer in two paragraphs to the report on Chile of the OAS Human Rights Commission. I will say that the human rights issue has impaired relations between the US and Chile. This is partly the result of Congressional actions. I will add that I hope you will shortly remove these obstacles... I can do no less, without producing a reaction in the US which would lead to legislative restrictions. The speech is not aimed at Chile. I wanted to tell you about this. My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist.'

The Memoir 'As Secretary of State, I felt I had, the responsibility to encourage the Chilean government in the direction of greater democracy through a policy of understanding Pinochet's concerns... Pinochet reminded me that "Russia supports their people 100 per cent. We are behind you. You are the leader. But you have a punitive system for your friends." I returned to my underlying theme that any major help from us would realistically depend on progress on human right. The Memcon 'There is merit in what you say. It is curious time in the US... It is unfortunate. We have been through Vietnam and Watergate. We have to wait until the (1976) elections. We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government. We are not out to weaken your position.'

In an unpleasant way, Pinochet twice mention the name of Orlando Letelier, the exiled Chilean opposition leader, accusing him of misleading the US Congress. Kissinger's response was to apoloyse for the Congress and to suggest that the dictator should hope for better days after the upcoming elections. Three months later, a car bomb in Washington killed Letelier; it is the only such outrage ever committed in the nation's capital by agents of a foreign regime. The man responsible, the Chilean secret policeman General Manfred Contreras, has since testified at trial that he took no action without personal orders from Pinochet.

In advising a murderer and despot to disregard his upcoming remarks as a sop to Congress, Kissinger insulted democracy in both countries. And, in the light of the return to democracy in Chile, and the decision of the Chilean courts to pursue truth and justice, it maligns a dignified and humane people, who have suffered much more than verbal insult at his hands.

8

the Valenzuela group, aided by some of
Viaux's gang, and equipped with the tear gas
grenades delivered by the CIA, attempted to
grab General Schneider as he left an official
dinner. The attempt failed because he left in
a private car and not the expected official
vehicle. The failure produced an extremely
significant cable from CIA headquarters in
Washington to the local station, asking for
urgent action because "Headquarters must
respond during morning 20 October to
queries from high levels."

Payments of $50,000 each to General
Viaux and his chief associate were then
authorised on the condition that they made
another attempt. On the evening of October
20, they did. But again there was only
failure to report. On October 22, the "sterile"
machine guns above-mentioned were
handed to Valenzuela's group for another try.
Later that same day, General Viaux's gang
finally murdered General Schneider.

According to the later verdict of the
Chilean military courts, this atrocity partook
of elements of both tracks of Track Two. In
other words, Valenzuela was not himself on
the scene but the assassination squad, led by
Viaux, contained men who had participated
in the preceding two attempts. Viaux was
convicted on charges of kidnapping and of
conspiring to cause a coup. Valenzuela was
convicted of the charge of conspiracy to cause
a coup. So any subsequent attempt to distin-
guish the two plots from each other, except in
point of degree, is an attempt to confect a dis-
tinction without a difference.

It scarcely matters whether Schneider was
shut because of a kidnapping scheme that
went awry (he was said, but only by the assas-
sins to have had the temerity to resist) or

LACRAMPE/PHOTOS

CABINET PRESS

A case to answer? Truth and reconciliation
commissions are now the vogue around the
world, as countries try to heal the wounds
of past injustices and cruelties. It is not an
exercise the United States has undertaken,
nor is likely to. Hence Henry Kissinger, who
has already given his version of events in his
autobiographies, may never have to answer
for the crimes that have been laid at his door

9.

Whether his assassination was the objective in the first place, The Chilean military police report, as it happens, describes a straightforward murder. Under the law of every law-abiding country (including the United States), crime committed in the pursuit of a kidnapping is thereby aggravated, not mitigated. But may not say, with a corpse at your feet, "I was only trying to kidnap him." At least, you may not say so if you hope to plead extenuating circumstances.

Yet a version of "extenuating circumstances" has become the paper-thin cover story with which Kissinger has since protected himself from the charge of being an accomplice, before and after the fact, in kidnap and murder. And this sorry cover story has even and a refuge in the written record. The late Intelligence Committee, in its investigation of the matter, concluded that since machine guns supplied to Valenzuela had not actually been employed in the killing, and since General Vianx had been officially discouraged by the CIA a few days before the murder, there was therefore "no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that United States officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during abduction".

Valter Isaacson, one of Kissinger's biographers, takes at face value a memo from Kissinger to Nixon after his meeting on October 15 with Karamessines, in which he asks to the president that he had "turned the Vianx plot. He also takes at face value the claim that Vianx's successful hit was essentially unauthorised.

These excuses and apologies are as logically feeble as they are morally contemptible. Henry Kissinger bears direct responsibility for the Schneider murder, as the following points demonstrate,

1. Brian MacMaster, one of the "false flag" agents mentioned in the cable traffic above, a career CIA man carrying a forged Colombian passport and claiming to represent American business interests in Chile, has told of his efforts to get "hush money" to jailed members of the Vianx group, after the assassination and before they could implicate the Agency.

2. Colonel Paul M Wimert, a military attaché in Santiago and chief CIA linison officer with the Valenzuela faction, has testified that after the Schneider killing he hastily retrieved the two payments of $50,000 that had been paid to Valenzuela and his partner, and also the three "sterile" machine guns. He then drove rapidly to the Chilean seaside town of Vina del Mar and hurled the guns into the ocean. His accomplice in this action, CIA station chief Henry Hecksher, had assured Washington only days before that either Vianx or Valenzuela would be able to eliminate Schneider and thereby trigger a coup.

3. Look again at the White House/Kissinger memo of October 15, and at the doggedly literal way it is retransmitted to Chile. In no sense of the term does it "turn off" Vianx. If anything, it incites him — a well-known and boastful fanatic — to redouble his efforts. "Preserve your assets. We will stay in touch. The time will come when you together with all your other friends can do something. You will continue to have our support." This is not exactly the

language of standing him down. The remainder of the memo speaks plainly of the intention to "disconrage him from acting alone", to "continue to encourage him to amplify his planning" and to "encourage him to join forces with other coup planners so that they may act in concert either before or after 24 October" (Italies added). The last three stipulations are an entirely accurate, not to say prescient, description of what Vianx actually did.

4. Consult again the cable received by Henry Hecksher on October 20, referring to anxious queries "from high levels" about the first of the failed attacks on Schneider. Thomas Karamessines, when questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee about this cable, testified of his certainty that the words "high levels" referred directly to Kissinger. In all previous communications from Washington, as a glance above will show, that had indeed been the case. This on its own is enough to demolish Kissinger's claim to have "turned off" Track Two (and its interior tracks) on October 15.

5. Ambassador Korry later made the obvious point that Kissinger was attempting to build a paper alibi in the event of a failure by the Vianx group. "His interest was not in Chile but in who was going to be blamed for what. He wanted me to be the one who took the hont. Henry didn't want to be associated with a failure and he was setting up a record to blame the State Department. He brought me in to the President because he wanted me to say what I had to say about Vianx; he wanted me to be the soft man."

The concept of "deniability" was not as well understood in Washington in 1970 as it has since become. But it is clear that Henry

Kissinger wanted two things simultaneously. He wanted the removal of General Schneider, by any means and employing any proxy. (No instruction from Washington to leave Schneider unharmed was ever given; deadly weapons were sent by diplomatic pouch, and men of violence were carefully selected to receive them.) And he wanted to be out of the picture in case such an attempt might fail, or he uncovered. These are the normal motives of anyone who solicits or suborns murder.

However, Kissinger needed the crime very slightly more than he needed, or was able to design, the deniability. Without waiting for his many hidden papers to be released or subpoenaed, we can say with safety that he is prima facie guilty of direct collusion in the murder of a democratic officer in a democratic and peaceful country.

© Christopher Hitchens, 2001.

This is an edited extract from The Trial Of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens, to be published by Verso, priced £15, on April 30. To reserve a copy of this title for the reduced price of £13, plus 99p UK p&p, freephone Guardian Cultureshop on 0800 316 6102.

Continued on Monday In our G2 section: How Kissinger made himself an accomplice in a plan of political assassination in Cyprus which, when it went awry, led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, the violent uprooting of almost 2,000 refugees, and the creation of an unjust and unstable amputation of Cyprus which still constitutes a serious threat to peace today. The Guardian's second exclusive extract from Christopher Hitchens's Incendiary book.

Statement Drafted by Bill Rogers/Revised by HAK on 7/5/01

The State Department and the CIA have recently released a copious
collection of the official documents relating to U.S. policy toward Chile a
quarter century ago. As the documents demonstrate, the investigation of the
Horman murder was carried out by the U.S. Embassy in Chile and fully
backed by the U.S. Department of State. It is inappropriate to imply that
former Secretary of State Kissinger has any independent knowledge of the
Horman case, or that he can add anything to the substantial documentary
record already made public by the Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency. This is why in an analogous request by a French judge the
Department of State intervened to have all queries directed to Department of
State rather than to individual former officials.

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, INC.

350 PARK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10022

TELEPHONE: 212-759-7919/

FACSIMILE: 212-759-0042

FACSIMILE TRANSMITTAL SHEET

TO:
Dr. Kissinger

FROM:
Rebecca Jordan

COMPANY:

DATE:
July 5

FAX NUMBER:

TOTAL NO. OF PAGES INCLUDING COVER:
6

PHONE NUMBER:

RE:
Various

DC office called with following message:

Paul Basken (Bloomberg News) would like your comments on the situation in Chile.

203-634-1827

Attached is the most recent article posted on the internet.

How would you like us to respond?

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Chile Judge Seeks Kissinger Probe in
'Missing' Case

Copyright 2001 "Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The following news report may
not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without the prior written
consent of Reuters Ltd."

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - A Chilean judge has taken steps to question former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger over the 1973 killing in Chile of a U.S. journalist highlighted in the film "Missing."

Legal sources said judge Juan Guzman on Wednesday sent a list of written questions for Kissinger about the death of journalist Charles Horman to Chile's Supreme Court. The court will decide whether to pass on the list to the State Department.

"He signed the list of questions for Kissinger," a legal source told Reuters, referring to the judge.

Horman was seized by troops at his Santiago home days after the September 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. The leftist journalist's body was found later and he is believed to have been killed by troops loyal to Pinochet.

Horman's relatives say the U.S. Embassy knew the journalist was being held at a notorious mass detention center in Chile's National Stadium but did nothing to help him.

State Department reports declassified last year show that U.S. intelligence officials may have tacitly helped in Horman's abduction.

The case was made famous by the 1982 movie "Missing," starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek as Horman's father and wife.

Kissinger, secretary of state between 1973-1977, in May refused a request by a French judge to answer questions about the disappearances or killings of French citizens under Pinochet.

The former dictator is facing charges in Chile of covering up the activities of a military death squad that operated in northern Chile. A judge is to decide in the coming days whether Pinochet, who now has dementia, is mentally fit to stand trial.

07/04/2001 19:23

RTOS

BOOKS IN REVIEW

YESTERDAY'S REALISM

BY STANLEY HOFFMANN

JUL 16 2001

Epstein's *Book Business*, a hardback that I happened to have as well. I felt relieved that I'd be able to enjoy the author's wisdom on paper.

It struck me later that I had no recollection of exactly how it came to be that I put the icon for Epstein's digital essays on my computer screen. Where did these essays come from? Somewhere on the World Wide Web, no doubt, but I couldn't tell you where. It's not usually that way with acquiring a book. I can remember quite clearly, even though it was 20 years ago, buying a three-volume set of Montaigne's essays in Powell's, a used-book store on 57th Street in Chicago. I had been eyeing the beautifully bound collection for weeks, vacillating about whether to part with the $25 Powell's was asking. I remember where these books were on the shelves and the feeling of carrying them up to the counter. Once the cash was out of my hands, I felt only the satisfaction that comes from owning something well made, durable, and valuable.

Maybe that's not so important. Information, thoughts, and ideas are useful whether they are presented on paper or by some other means. In *Book Business* [reviewed by Scott Stossel in TAP, January 29, 2001], Epstein makes the important distinction between the future of the book industry and the future of books. Methods of printing, of distribution, and of sales are being transformed. Since he believes that the publishing industry is in "terminal decrepitude," Epstein sees the arrival of new technologies as providential. He doesn't fear, as some do, that books will lose their power: "New technologies do not erase the past, but build on it."

Sometimes new technologies supplant old ones, though. In the case of books, I don't think it can happen. To close with a summery thought, I make this bold prediction: You will never, ever, want to take an e-book to the beach. Computer chips, for one thing, do not like the hot sun.

Or am I being too optimistic? Maybe a coolant system for the e-book reading machine is being invented at this very moment and the traditional book as we've known it really is dead. ♦

Of course America needs a foreign policy! The title of Henry Kissinger's new book suggests that it hasn't had one recently—a thesis supported by his many criticisms of President Bill Clinton's diplomacy as well as by the statement, early in the book, that "in the face of perhaps the most profound and widespread upheavals the world has ever seen," the United States has "failed to develop concepts relevant to the emerging realities." The problem with *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?*, however, is that the foreign policy Kissinger proposes is flawed. It is so deeply rooted in the past of world politics and in his own conservative conception of Realpolitik that it is only partly relevant to the realities of today.

Kissinger has no peers as a geopolitical thinker. His skill in getting to the heart of issues is particularly evident in his chapter on the Middle East. Describing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he writes that negotiations have to deal with both "the stuff of diplomacy"—territory and strategic issues—and "the stuff of theology," which includes the "mandates of ideology, religion and diplomacy." His ability to sum up a conundrum in an epigram, to paint a country's or a continent's history in a few brushstrokes, to get at the essence of a cultural style, is

unmatched: "Japan's culture does not so much seek to beguile foreigners—as does China's—as to surround them with its pervasive distinctiveness so that they have no choice but to adjust to its requirements." His brand of realism, like that advanced 50 years ago by University of Chicago political scientist Hans Morgenthau, never forgets that it is the actors,

especially the major states, that shape the international system, rather than the other way around. In this view, power is the indispensable coin of the realm of world affairs, force is the

most essential component of power, and a major nation must be forever vigilant so that other nations do not dominate strategically vital regions. A major power must also be forever prudent about not throwing its might around and provoking a coalition of its rivals.

Thus, Kissinger's recommendations about China are sensible (and close to Clinton's strategy!): "A policy that is perceived as having designated China as the enemy primarily because its economy is growing and its ideology is distasteful would end up isolating the United States." China's passion could turn out to be nationalism, not communism; hence the need for a cautious American policy toward Taiwan and one toward China that perceives the United States as "a potential safety net" for the People's Republic. A confrontational strategy at a time when China does

not have the capacity to dominate Asia would be a grave mistake. The motto for U.S. policy in Asia ought to be balancing, not bullying: The latter could drive China and Russia together again.

*Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century,*
by Henry Kissinger.

Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $30.00.

JULY 30, 2001 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Kissinger offers shrewd insights on many fronts. He warns that there is no international consensus to leave nuclear weapons behind and that different motives still push nations to want to acquire them. He notes that globalization could be set back should a major recession develop in the United States. And he offers observations about the growing gap between rich nations and poor ones (as well as between the “globalized” and the “backward” sectors within countries). He delivers a sharp critique of the International Monetary Fund’s inability “to apply political and social criteria” and warns of the danger of a “crisis of legitimacy” for an international economic system that “creates new vulnerabilities to political turmoil.” His rather new emphasis on the need for a dialogue with India (whose conduct during the Cold War he compares to that of the United States at its inception) is welcome. So are—idealisers should recognize it—his observations about the difficulty of implanting “Western democratic principles of political organization” in Africa and his reminder that “the pursuit of moral ends in international affairs has a different context from that in domestic politics.” In diplomacy, Kissinger writes, “morality expresses itself in the willingness to persevere through a series of steps, each of which is inevitably incomplete in terms of the ultimate goal.”

With so great a mastery of his subject, so deep an understanding of history, and so convincing a belief that neither Wilsonian messianism nor the outright championing of American hegemony—those two forms of what he calls the “imposition of American solutions on the world’s trouble spots”—can lead to sensible policies, why is Kissinger’s book ultimately disappointing? For two reasons: its debatable geopolitical advice and its failure to come to terms with all that isn’t pure Realpolitik.

To the first problem, then. Sometimes, Kissinger’s acute perception of possible threats becomes excessive. He feared a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany during much of the Cold War—it never came—and he still fears a

rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. His view of Russia is far less benign than his appreciation of China, and there is no attempt here to map possibilities of cooperation with President Vladimir Putin’s regime. A Russia faced with huge external and internal challenges might need the United States as “a geopolitical option” just as China does, yet Kissinger won’t have it. His endorsement of new antiballistic missile defenses is not based on a serious discussion of the threat from rogue states, perhaps because he advocates defenses that could stop “established non-rogue nuclear powers” as well. But if this is so, the arguments against a relaunching of the race for offensive nuclear weapons—and concerns about the unraveling of the whole tapestry of nuclear arms control if the United States dumps the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which was negotiated by Kissinger, who now minimizes its intrinsic importance)—ought to have been addressed in greater detail and less dismissively. The larger issues of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and of terrorism are not discussed at all.

At times the measures Kissinger proposes are unlikely to improve matters as much as he supposes. Encouraging South Korea to avoid marginalization by taking the lead in negotiations with North Korea is dubious advice, because the United States cannot leave the nuclear issue entirely to the two Koreas. “Determined purposefulness” to preserve the U.S. position in the Persian Gulf is not obviously better than the “thrashing around” of the Clinton administration toward Iraq. Leaving African security questions to the Africans—because there is no strategic American security interest there—is a cop-out.

The idea of a new set of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinians—one that focuses only on territorial issues (other than Jerusalem) and allows the United States to stop being a “broker in legal compromise” as it was at Camp David—is, on paper, sensible. (Was it really different in the days of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy?) But the fact that such issues as the right of return, the future of Jerusalem, and the ultimate fate of the settlements have been raised will make it very difficult for the Palestinian negotiators to pour them back into the bottle.

Some of the contradictions in *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?* are bizarre. Kissinger criticizes the United States for failing to put enough force behind its policies after the Korean cease-fire in 1951, after the beginning of negotiations with North Vietnam in 1968, and at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In doing so, he mixes two cases—Korea and the Gulf—in which force was indeed held back (though for very different reasons) with another, Vietnam, in which the United States exercised little restraint in applying force (though it proved singularly ineffective).

Kissinger wants to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (although not to include the Baltic states) but argues that NATO should be seen as a military alliance, not as an instrument of collective security. Though he worries that NATO missions in other parts of the world threaten to dissolve the alliance “into a multilateral mishmash,” he nevertheless wants the NATO nations to go beyond a mere “safety net” conception, to define common purposes, and to resolve together a host of economic and geopolitical issues. Moreover, Kissinger seems unable to conceive of this sprawling enterprise in terms of anything other than the past—that is, as an unequal partnership in which the United States is the dominant player. He therefore trains his heavy artillery on the notion of an autonomous European military capacity and on the European Union’s insistence on reaching decisions without the participation of the United States. The European force, he writes, “in practice would have to be integrated with NATO.” How attractive is this likely to be to the European Union? Would the EU like to be encased in a transatlantic free trade area and an Atlantic steering group? We are not very far from Kissinger’s 1973 ideas for the “year of Europe”—but how compatible are those ideas with his warnings against the costs and perils of hegemony?

The other flaw of the book concerns those “emerging realties” that Kissinger acknowledges at the outset. He is too intelligent to deny the existence of important new aspects of international affairs: Private economic actors (investors, multi-

34

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT JULY 30, 2001

national corporations, speculators) and private pressure groups (economic, humanitarian, and social ones) act along with states; terrorists, mercenaries, and mafiosi operate across borders; and foreign policies are activated not only by the "realism" of state leaders but by the interests, ideas, and passions of citizens and by inside forces mobilized by the revolution in communications. The map of passions must be added to that of bases and resources. But Kissinger's tendency is either to be blind to or deeply resentful of the imperatives that must be heeded if one hopes to prevent these new forces from breeding chaos. He retreats into long-established views of power politics among sovereign states.

Consider his discussion of globaliza-
tion. He has little to say about how to
deal with “the mismatch between the
world’s political and economic systems.”
He notes that “politics divide the world
into national units” and understands
that for the sake of economic growth
political leaders “cannot survive as
advocates of near permanent austerity.”
But he does not stress the fact that
globalization in its present form is an
American construction whose eco-
nomic and cultural manifestations are
largely American, and that they there-
fore expose the United States to formi-
dable resentments that it is in the
nation’s interest to deflect. And precisely
because he is not among those who see
globalization as a force for individual
emancipation, political accommodation,
democracy, and peace, he needs to tell
us how the disruptions it entails will be
handled in a world in which a few rich
individuals can destroy currencies,
excessive or ill-considered loans can
destroy economies, and the loss or ero-
sion of states’ sovereignty makes it more
difficult for them to prevent or handle
crises. One way to address such insta-
bility would be to have effective global
institutions—the World Trade Organiza-
tion is a beginning—that can regulate
and define norms for world trade,
provide “firebreaks” for the inter-
national financial system, and impose
a modicum of discipline on short-term
or speculative investments. In the old
order before 1914, the need for inter-
national institutions capable of manag-
ing the world economy was not an issue.

Kissinger sees the problem but cannot adequately face the solution: better agencies for global governance now that governance can be left neither to a hegemon that is part of the problem nor to the anarchy of shrinking states.

Kissinger is wise enough to recognize that "two world wars and the insufficient scale of the European nation-state in the face of global challenges have made the nineteenth-century balance of power irrelevant" in Europe, but he fails to underline the originality of the European Union and acknowledge its pioneering qualities: All he sees is a complicated process that excludes the United States from European

decision making. The members of the European Union have understood that the EU supplements their power, strengthens their influence, and allows them to recover at the union level much of what they have lost at the national one. The United States has lost far less sovereignty than most other states, and it is wealthier and mightier than all others. Nevertheless, it can't control the global economy by itself. It needs strong institutions both to help it try to do so and to avoid becoming the single target of all the world's discontents. Yet Kissinger has never shown much sympathy for international institutions, which he finds either incompetent or too resistant to American preeminence. (It's worth remembering that Morgenthau, a realist, thought that the predicament of a nuclear world would require a world government.)

Beyond economic globalization, there is political globaliza-
tion, which involves a wide-
spread movement for human
rights. Here Kissinger's attitude is a mix
of skepticism and hostility. It is not the
idea of human rights that Kissinger
denigrates—he expresses his support
for it many times—but it is the attempt
to go beyond the mere aspiration
that turns him into a defender of the
Westphalian principles of sovereignty
and nonintervention. (The Peace of

Westphalia, recall, ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and led to the rise of the system of nation-states.) In one of his many striking insights, Kissinger points out that by removing religious issues from the subjects of contention and "carnage" in world affairs, the Westphalian principle of noninterference in the domestic

affairs of other states was
"the human rights slogan
of the day." Westphalia,
he states correctly, "dealt
with the problem of
peace and left justice
to the domestic institu-
tions." But the twentieth-
century horrors that
resulted from the practices
of totalitarian regimes and
from the clashes of ethnic
groups within states have
led to a demand for new

principles that justify collective inter-
ference to protect people from mur-
derous enterprises such as "ethnic
cleansing" and genocide. This is a major
aspect of the erosion of the border
between what is inside and what is out-
side the state, and between domestic and
foreign policy. It is not true, as Kissinger
asserts, that contemporary human rights
activists believe that "peace flows auto-
matically from justice." They know that
protecting human rights abroad leads to
turmoil, just as the exercise of collective
security against interstate aggression
breeds violence. But they also know that
the gravest violations of rights require, in
Kissinger's words, "some kind of supra-
national authority, entitled to use force
to make its writ run," and this he deems
unacceptable. Why?

In part, he tells us, it is because recent
cases of military intervention "reflected
no traditional notion of American
national interest," since "their outcome
could in no way affect any historic defi-
nition of American security." Kissinger
seems to be arguing that the fact that
such initiatives "were a response to
powerful domestic pressures to alleviate
human suffering" made them ipso facto
suspect. He also rejects such military
interventions because the desire to limit
risks and casualties for the intervenors
reduced the efficacy of the endeavors
and because the intervenors, when
they prevailed, were left with almost

> Though he urges that attention be paid to "emerging realities," Kissinger's worldview is rooted in the past.

35

BOOKS IN REVIEW

insoluble problems of internal reconciliation and nation building. Finally, Kissinger frowns on humanitarian military intervention because it is “put forward as a universal prescription applicable to all situations without reference to the historical or cultural context.” But in many instances—such as Rwanda—nothing was done, and in others—Chechnya—little can be done.

It is, of course, true that extending the notion of collective security from external aggression to internal violations of rights is unlikely to be any more universally applied than the UN charter's ban on aggression. But is this a reason to scrap the prescription, as if the impossibility of arresting all criminals justifies giving up on law and law enforcement?

The interventions that Kissinger trenchantly criticizes—especially those in Bosnia and Kosovo—are open to challenge. To be sure, in Bosnia the intervenors are stuck with an artificial, multi-ethnic new state in which the three ethnic components live apart and two of them seek to reunite with their respective brothers and sisters in Croatia and Serbia. As Kissinger says, the intervenors gave preference to the principle of non-acquisition of territory by force over that of self-determination (which Kissinger seems to support even though it has proved to be a major destroyer of the sovereignty of states). But partition, his preferred solution, would have rewarded Serb and Croat aggressions and would have established a highly destructive precedent. Concerning Kosovo, Kissinger ignores former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic's plans for ethnic cleansing (for which he blames NATO). Kissinger's belief that “the desired outcome of an autonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia... could have been achieved at less cost and in a less convulsive fashion” seems very much like wishful thinking.

The post-Westphalian advances that humanitarian interventions represent have been ad hoc and tentative, and they have raised more problems than they have solved. But the problems they tried to address do need to be addressed. This means, once again, strengthening the international and regional organizations

that give such interventions their legitimacy. That can be done by providing them with standing forces and with a capacity to effect the nation-building tasks of material administration and political reconstruction—in cooperation and coordination with the often discordant nongovernmental organizations whose participation in these tasks is indispensable. The alternative is a world of chaos, with disintegrating pseudostates and ethnic, religious, and political upheavals destroying even more genuine ones. Kissinger himself, having declared Africa of no strategic interest for the United States, acknowledges that a “limited military intervention” might have been a duty, and a success, in Rwanda. He thinks that the violations committed there could have been “quickly brought under control.” But is this more evident than it was in some of the interventions he criticizes?

Kissinger is rather silent on the possibilities that reformed and strengthened collective institutions might offer—even though their members are states, which, as a good Westphalian, he trusts more than he does jurists. He is virulently incensed by the role lawyers have been playing in carrying out what he calls the “unprecedented concept” of universal jurisdiction when it comes to human rights violations. Whether it be nations authorizing domestic prosecutors to seek extradition and trials of accused war criminals, or the setting up of international criminal courts—so far, for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC), which the United States has refused to accept—Kissinger is against such developments. He is not wrong in proclaiming that “any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but to constrain the righteous.” But his defense of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the worst-case scenarios he conjures in the case of the ICC are unconscionable. (Is the heat of those pages somehow an anticipation of his recent misadventure at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he refused to respond after being summoned by a French court investigating a charge against Pinochet?)

Kissinger is right that there is a tension between the principle of universal jurisdiction and the political need for reconciliation, but there can be no true reconciliation without a degree of justice. He is wrong to think that the advocates of universal jurisdiction believe that “if law replaced politics, peace and justice would prevail.” What they in fact believe is that law is necessary to correct the excesses of politics and power. And Kissinger’s own proposals for an alternative to the ICC would leave the punishment of the authors of war crimes or crimes against humanity in the hands of the UN Security Council—that is, in the throes of politics, often untempered by norms.

Ultimately, Kissinger's case against the new drive for humanitarian interventions dodges the problem that has plagued realists ever since Morgenthau proclaimed the mantra that national interests are paramount. Is there a clearly defined and delimited national interest? On security and survival, it is easy to agree—but is everything that a government claims is in its security interest really necessary? (Think anti-missile defenses, or remember Kissinger's rival Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted that the outcome of the Cold War might be decided in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia!) Kissinger is clearly on the side of John Quincy Adams (who said that America “does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. ... She is the champion and vindicator only of her own” freedom and independence) and of Theodore Roosevelt—not Woodrow Wilson. While Wilson's hyperbolic statements rejecting a “standard of national selfishness” are easy to dismiss, his belief that this age requires us also to think about “the interest of mankind” is not so easily ignored.

Material interdependence; the speed with which political turmoil can be transmitted, if only in the form of millions of refugees (a term not found in the index of Kissinger's book); the “germ of a universal consciousness” detected by Raymond Aron—all of these factors require broadening the concept of the national interest so as to include considerations of world order, justice, and humanity. It is not a matter of imposing them on others who are inevitably suspicious of neocolonialism or all too ready

36 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT JULY 30, 2001

to see it in all defenses of human rights. But it is precisely a preponderant power such as the United States that most needs norms to constrain the behavior of others, as well as a conception of interest that goes beyond traditional strategic and geopolitical issues. Even realists recognize the prevention of genocide as a legitimate international interest that justifies intervention. The costs and risks of intervening are high; letting thugs go on rampages is even riskier. The sad fact that military intervention against the crimes of major powers (Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet) is not possible should not deter us from acting when it is, and from seeking other forms of pressure or dissuasion when it is not. A concept of stability or of order that covers up heinous domestic crimes is both immoral and unrealistic in the emerging world society.

Paradoxically, the world is increasingly unified despite its political fragmentation; and therefore justice as well as peace needs to be integrated into the concept of the national interest—a concept that, beyond the often ambiguous case of state survival and security, has always had a variable content. “Fate,” writes Kissinger, “has propelled a nation convinced of the universal application of a single set of maxims into a world characterized by a multiplicity of historical evolutions requiring selective strategies.” This makes the task of diplomacy more difficult; it does not invalidate the maxims. Kissinger chooses to see in the Vietnam War a fiasco resulting from American “values being implemented too universally,” from “too indiscriminating an identification of its strategic interests with Wilsonian principles.” (He did not say so at the time.) But for every Wilsonian going overboard in Vietnam, there were Wilsonians who didn’t. And for every realist who defended the war in purely strategic and balance-of-power terms, there were realists like Morgenthau and George Kennan who did not. What Vietnam “proved” was a very Kissingerian point—the need to know some history. But it also showed something that, on the whole, Wilsonians understand better than realists do: that what happens within a country is often more decisive than calculations of power balance. What a given statesman declares to be in

the national interest rests on assumptions about the nation's goals and status that go way beyond the strictly geopolitical. The alphabet of realism is too short. Today it is necessary to see the world scene as a contest between a global political system that is struggling to organize itself and a state system

Much of the story of Kissinger is already known (not that it's bad to be reminded), so the question that arises apropos of *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*, a book-length version of two articles Hitchens wrote for *Harper's* last winter, is: Why now? What about this moment leads Hitchens to train his considerable powers of detestation upon Kissinger? Some new facts have come to light in the interim, but the case against Richard Nixon's secretary of state stands much as it did in 1976, when a character in Joseph Heller's novel *Good as Gold* characterized Kissinger "as an odious *schlump* who made war gladly," a quote with which Hitchens opens his book.

And it's not as if time, celebrity, and innumerable $25,000-a-shot speaking engagements have washed Kissinger clean. On the contrary, being tainted provides the essential ingredient of his celebrity. As Hitchens notes, to have the likes of Kissinger at your table

that fiercely clings to principles that are increasingly challenged. Reducing international affairs to the latter is neither wise nor desirable. ♦

STANLEY HOFFMANN is the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University.

# KISSINGER, IN DEED

BY HARVEY BLUME

From the way that Christopher Hitchens tears into bloated reputations, it's easy to imagine that in another age he would have spent many a predawn hour happily preparing to duel. Now he has flung his challenge at Henry Kissinger, a man who generally liked to use the B-52 for predawn confrontations, though he might also send ground forces and, on special occasions, even an assassin.

is to enjoy the guilty pleasure of proximity to “raw and unapologetic power.” One of the unacknowledged merits of the International Tribunal at The Hague, then, is that it prevents at least some war criminals from being reborn as celebrities.

Because of the Hague tribunal—and efforts by Spanish courts to bring Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to trial—Hitchens concludes that the time has come to press charges in earnest against Henry Kissinger. Proceedings against Pinochet and against Slobodan Milosevic show that leaders of governments are no longer immune to prosecution for crimes against humanity. Hitchens wants the rules that apply to Chile

and Serbia to apply, also, to a superpower. “The United States,” he writes, “believes that it alone pursues and indicts war criminals and ‘international terrorists’; nothing in its political or journalistic culture yet allows for the

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens.

Verso, 160 pages, $22.00.

37

BOOKS IN REVIEW

thought that it might be honoring
and sheltering such a senior one [as
Kissinger].”

Justifiable as Hitchens's challenge to our political and journalistic culture may be, his book has serious flaws. It is, among other things, force of personality that carries Hitchens into battle with the likes of Kissinger; in this book, however, the author's personality gets in the way.

For example, Hitchens
describes the title of
Kissinger's memoir *Years
of Renewal* as "unbearably
dull and self-regarding."
This sort of language in
reference to a mere title
does nothing but testify to
the richness of Hitchens's
disdain while it sews
doubts about his trust-
worthiness. Also, the book
has no endnotes—a prob-
lem in a text meant to
make a legal as opposed
to a purely polemical

argument. In lieu of endnotes, which
would have been the proper place for the
long block quotations he includes,
Hitchens interposes them in the text,
again and again interrupting the flow of
narrative. Hitchens is usually a prose
stylist and a good read. *The Trial of
Henry Kissinger* is a bad read. That does
not mean that it makes a bad case; it
only suggests that if Hitchens wanted to
reach a wider readership with the book
than he did with the magazine articles,
this may not be the book to do it.

Hitchens brings six charges against Kissinger. They range from "deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh" to "personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C." Though crimes directly pertaining to the war in Vietnam are alleged in only the first charge—"the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina"— that war, in one way or another, set the stage for all other transgressions.

As Hitchens makes plain, the
Watergate break-in and the overthrow
of the duly elected government of
Salvador Allende in Chile—together

with the assassination of General Rene
Schneider, the one Chilean leader who
might have prevented the Pinochet
coup—were of a piece. So was the assas-
sination of Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a
critic of the military junta ruling Greece,
where Nixon and Kissinger had many
good friends, including some who could
be counted on for finances in a pinch. As
for slaughter in East Timor, that, too,
was related to Vietnam. The Indonesian
leader Suharto, after all, was an ally; to

keep him strong, and safe
from contamination by
falling-domino disease,
Kissinger, personally, had
no compunctions about
giving him a green light
to invade the newly
independent nation of
East Timor. Even events
in distant Bangladesh
orbited around Vietnam,
though more remotely.
India, striving for neutral-
ity in the Cold War,
refused to rally around
the American cause in

Indochina. Pakistan, on the other hand,
was ruled by just the kind of generals
Kissinger liked to see in high places:
Ergo, they got a free hand in overturning
the election in Bangladesh, then known
as East Pakistan.

Hitchens concludes
that the time has
come to press
charges against
Henry Kissinger as
a war criminal.

Hitchens shows that besides
influencing American policy
in the geopolitical sense, the
Vietnam War also altered
policy by corrupting the American
leadership. The high stakes of escalating
war encouraged Kissinger and Nixon to
believe that there were few laws they
were bound to respect in bringing the
conflict to their kind of conclusion.
What kind of conclusion would that be?
Whatever conclusion they chose to
effect, the important thing was that at all
costs they must be the ones to effect it.
"By any means necessary" was a slogan
once used and abused in certain sections
of the antiwar movement. Reading *The
Trial of Henry Kissinger* establishes, once
again, how well the excesses of the
peace movement mirrored, in minia-
ture, the mentality of U.S. leaders.

Determined to prosecute the war in
Vietnam by any means necessary, Nixon

and Kissinger applied the same logic to
attaining and holding power. Hitchens
maintains that even before Watergate
there was an illegal attempt by Republi-
cans to secure the presidency—this one
successful (throw in George W. Bush's
win in 2000 and it's hard not to detect a
pattern). In 1968, Hitchens writes,
Nixon and “underlings”—chief among
them, Henry Kissinger—convinced the
South Vietnamese leadership to with-
draw from the Paris peace talks, thus
weakening the position of Hubert
Humphrey, the Democratic candidate
for president, and contributing to
Nixon's victory. Nixon and Kissinger
promised the Vietnamese a better deal
than they would have received from
the Democrats. In the end, the South
Vietnamese got pretty much the same
deal, only many avoidable horrors later.

Hitchens re-creates what he calls
the “part-Mafioso and part-banana-
republic atmosphere” that prevailed in
the White House in the early 1970s, a
time when hideous phrases like “body
count” were still in vogue. Bob Kerrey
has recently stated that whatever he
and his men did in the village of Thanh
Phong in 1969 was nothing when com-
pared with the kind of brutality the
Viet Cong could inflict on civilians.
Perhaps Kerrey should read Hitchens’s
accounts of the massive bombardments
of Laos and Cambodia by B-52s, which
“give no warning of approach and are
incapable of accuracy or discrimination
because of their altitude and the mass of
their shells.” How many Thanh Phong
atrocities, how many My Lai massacres
fell on Indochina from the skies?

If nothing else, this book rekindles a
desire for a full accounting of the war.
Let the trial of Henry Kissinger take
place, just as Hitchens demands. It
would be exquisitely painful to be
drawn back into that world of sub-
terfusion and destruction, but at least the
right would find it difficult to go on
pretending that the war in Vietnam was
a glorious lost cause. And the rest of us
would be spared surprise when nasty
reminders of what the war really was
like—such as the story of Thanh
Phong—burst into view. ♦

HARVEY BLUME is a regular contributor
to *The American Prospect.*

38

THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

JULY 30, 2001

Barbara Amiel-Black

To: Dr. Henry Kissinger
Subject: Christopher Hitehona etc.

JUL 09 2001

Dear Henry:

You mentioned that you were going to send me material on Hitchens involvement with Holocaust deniers (approving citations in denial books, his own comments etc.).

I quite understand if you don't have time to do that but I think it is absolutely key that you have
researchers pull together such a file in case of any action. One would want a file on
EVERYTHING that Hitchens has written or been cited in whether it is about the Holocaust or
anything else. I don't think Hitchens could stand up to cross-examination (nor do I think he would
want to start talking about his view of the "Holocaust Industry"---though I must say I happen on
this one point to agree in part with him.....)

Re your response to press questions when on your book tour: I still think it key that you not
include the phrase you mentioned on the telephone, namely "and if I am wrong..." unless your
lawyer has a very good reason.

It seems to me that the best phrase would be to simply say

"My dispute with Hitchens concerns the accusations he has made against me and therefore I have
no reason to pursue this subject. He has offered to show me evidence of his point of view ON
THE HOLOCAUST and IF HE DOES SO I'm certainly willing to look at it."

(I've put in caps the additions I'd probably make. I wouldn't want Hitchens to use this as an excuse
to start sending you evidence of other disputes he has with you!!! and I think it important to
emphasize that "if he does so..." )

Anything you say that sounds fearful will be taken by Hitchens as a sign of weakness. He will go
to town on such a point. I don't think he will want to go to court but I wouldn't want to give him a
single phrase that he can use against you in quotes somewhere.

If CH sues you for defamation the issue becomes CH's reputation, character etc. It will be you
who gets the opportunity to delve into every aspect of CH's sayings and doings, not vice versa.
Under most ordinary circumstances as you know, it is far better to be the defendant than the
plaintiff in such a lawsuit (as Oscar Wilde or David Irving discovered to their peril...)

Meanwhile, Conrad and I are free, if you and Nancy feel like it, on July 24, 25, and 26. We
understand completely if you are washed out because we are. The London Season has been
sheer hell but seeing you two is always balm to the soul.