The contentious legacy of Henry Kissinger

HENRY Alfred Kissinger, born on May 27, 1923, in Bavaria as Heinz Alfred Kissinger, was an intellectual giant. He was also a very controversial person. Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983) marked the beginning of the controversies surrounding him.

Since 2001, the Washington DC-based National Security Archive of the George Washington University (NSAGWU) had been making legal efforts to bring Kissinger’s papers into the public domain. This was because Kissinger had removed the recorded telephone conversations and office files from the State Department when he left office in 1976. To obtain these, the NSAGWU had to file suits under the Freedom of Information Act against Kissinger, the US State Department and the US Government’s National Archives and Record Administration.

On Kissinger’s death on November 29, the NSAGWU published a ‘declassified obituary’ that highlighted his achievements, including détente with the USSR, the breakthrough with China and the West Asia shuttle diplomacy. The assessment also exposed his ‘darker side’, including the overthrow of democracy in Chile, which paved the way for a brutal dictatorship, his ‘disdain for human rights and support for dirty and even genocidal wars abroad’, the secret bombing in Southeast Asia and, finally, his involvement in the Richard Nixon administration’s criminal abuses, including ‘the secret wiretaps of his own top aides’.

The assessment was also based on the colossal number of papers that the NSAGWU managed to reveal, including 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of Kissinger’s phone conversations, which he had secretly recorded and had made his secretaries transcribe. Most of these conversations were recorded without the other persons’ permission since, as told to the NSAGWU by his aides, Kissinger wanted to remember “which lie he told to whom”.

I feel that his China diplomacy stands out among his achievements. It took a lot of time for Nixon and Kissinger to realign a new policy towards Beijing after diplomatic reverses in that region consequent to the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia. Earlier efforts to open a dialogue had reached nowhere. In September 1970, Nixon asked Kissinger to make one more effort.

The opportunity came in October when Pakistan President Yahya Khan visited the US. Kissinger had tried through two more channels: one through Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and the other via his old friend WR Smyser, a former diplomat, who contacted ‘J’ (Jean) in Paris, who was friendly with the Chinese ambassador, a ‘Long March’ veteran.

Ultimately, only the Pakistan channel worked. That elevated its status among the most dependable US allies. On December 9, 1970, a message from Khan was received by Pakistan Ambassador Agha Hilaly in Washington DC. He read out this message to Kissinger, which also contained a message from Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, conveying their agreement to hold talks with US President Nixon.

Kissinger made his preparatory visit from July 9 to 11, 1971, through an elaborate subterfuge. First, he visited New Delhi on July 9; it did not go off very well. Not that it mattered to him since his destination was elsewhere. The same day, he reached Islamabad and complained of ‘Delhi belly’. Yahya advised him to rest at the hill station of Nathia Gali near Abbottabad in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Instead, Kissinger secretly drove to Islamabad to board a PIA airplane for Beijing.

That was how the path-breaking initiative from Nixon had fructified. Pakistan had a great role in this. It is not that indirect US-China talks were not going on in the interregnum. Zhou mentioned to Kissinger on July 9 that their delegations had met 136 times during the last 16 years. However, there was no ‘intention’ to solve problems.

In Beijing, Kissinger spent 17 hours with Zhou in five meetings (July 9-11), not to mention another four hours in drafting minutes and communications. The transcripts of these meetings, running into 102 pages, indicate how forceful, blunt and deep the Chinese diplomatic bargaining was, even at that time when they were considered comparatively weak. In his report to Nixon, Kissinger said the meetings were “the most searching, sweeping and most significant discussions I have ever had in the government”.

He wrote, according to declassified documents: “The Chinese treated the entire visit with elaborate correctness and courtesy. They were extremely tough on substance and ideological in their approach, but their dealings were meticulous; they concentrated on essentials; they eschewed invective and haggling over details.”

The next day (July 10), Zhou bluntly suggested to Kissinger that the US should withdraw all armed forces from the Taiwan area and the Taiwan Strait, recognise China as the sole representative of the Chinese people, declare Taiwan as a part of China, affirm the ‘One China’ policy, and stop the State Department policy of saying that ‘Taiwan’s status is undetermined’.

India came in for criticism from both sides for being aggressive to Pakistan. Sympathies were with Yahya Khan and Pakistan. After this meeting, a separate secret channel was established through Gen Vernon Walters, US Military Attaché in Paris. Zhou’s final words to Kissinger on July 11 were: “Please tell Yahya Khan that if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan.”

However, China did not help Pakistan in the 1971 war. The US subsequently put out an explanation that Kissinger had misinterpreted Zhou’s remarks. What he meant was that China would not be an ‘idle spectator’.

Nixon’s visit to Beijing came during February 21-28, 1972. Again, we must depend upon the NSAGWU’s efforts, 27 years after this epoch-making visit, to know how it happened. When one compares these declassified documents, it could be seen that much more was revealed by the NSAGWU than the accounts provided by Nixon and Kissinger in their memoirs.

It was during these talks that we came to know why the Chinese were so angry with Jawaharlal Nehru. On February 22, Zhou denounced Khrushchev for inciting Nehru to ‘attack’ China in 1962. He also blamed Khrushchev for allegedly misleading India that China would not hit back, thus emboldening Nehru to take on China.

Views are personal