Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman

280 Pages·2015·1.42 MB·English

by  Greg Grandin

Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Henry Holt and Company ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use
only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright
infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you
are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher
at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Eleanor and Manu, again
There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who
create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their
own reality.
—Henry Kissinger, 1963
PRELUDE
On Not Seeing the Monster
Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and future Nobel Laureate, once asked
Henry Kissinger what was more terrifying: seeing the monster or not seeing the
monster?
It was early May 1970, just a few days after Richard Nixon appeared on TV
and told the nation that the United States had sent ground troops into Cambodia.
Nixon said that the operation was necessary to clear out enemy sanctuaries along
the border with Vietnam. But his speech also made clear that something much
more profound than military strategy had led to his decision to send ground
troops into a neutral country. “We live in an age of anarchy,” the president said.
“We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by
free civilizations in the last 500 years.” Nixon suggested that he had invaded
Cambodia not just in response to a foreign threat but to domestic disorder: “It is
not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight.” For
months, Nixon and Kissinger, his national security adviser, had said they had a
plan to get the United States out of Vietnam. Now, suddenly, they were
widening the war into a neighboring country. Four days after Nixon’s speech,
National Guardsmen opened fire at Kent State, killing four students who were
protesting the invasion. Nine more were wounded. Two weeks later, at Jackson
State, police shot into a group of protesting African American students, killing
two and wounding twelve.
Schelling bore some intellectual responsibility for America’s involvement in
Vietnam. He had a mind like a computer, which he used to apply mathematical
formulas to military strategy. Whether one was “deterring the Russians” or
“deterring one’s own children,” he said, the problem was the same: to figure out
the proper ratio of threat to incentive. Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of
defense, Robert McNamara, directly applied Schelling’s theories, bombing
North Vietnam as a form of behavior modification. Schelling also had a large
influence on the men who would take over America’s Vietnam policy from
Johnson and McNamara, particularly on Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had taught
at Harvard before he joined the Nixon White House and he considered Schelling
a friend. He had adopted the economist’s insights, especially the idea that
“bargaining power … comes from the capacity to hurt,” to cause “sheer pain and
damage.” It was a sentiment that Kissinger would try to operationalize in
Southeast Asia.1
By 1970, though, Schelling had turned against the war, and the US invasion
of Cambodia prompted him, along with eleven other prominent Harvard
professors, to travel to Washington to meet with Kissinger and register their
objections.2 This was no ordinary group of antiwar intellectuals. Over the years,
different labels have been applied to the kind of men who moved easily between
Washington and Cambridge, between the classroom and the war room: the
Eastern establishment, the best and the brightest, the power elite. These were
them. The Harvard delegation included two Nobel laureates, a future Nobel
laureate (Schelling), physicists, chemists, economists, and political scientists.
Many of them were former advisers to presidents going back to Harry Truman.
A number of the group had been involved in executing policies that led to early
American involvement in Vietnam.
Serious men, they took their break with the administration seriously. “This is
too much,” one told a reporter, referring to the invasion. Others were disturbed
about the coarsening of public discourse brought on by the war. “‘Professors’
and ‘liberals’—same thing,” was how Nixon’s undersecretary of defense, David
Packard, dismissed the delegation. One member, Ernest May, a Harvard dean
and military historian with close ties to the Pentagon, told Kissinger: “You’re
tearing the country apart domestically.”
Kissinger’s former colleagues weren’t aware that Nixon and Kissinger had
already been secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos for over a year (and would
continue to bomb for three more before Congress put an end to it). They knew
only about the invasion, and that was bad enough. “Sickening,” Schelling said.
Today in the United States, a shared and largely unquestioned assumption,