Sunday, Oct 11, 2015 06:00 AM EDT

Henry Kissinger, dangerous fraud: Why hes

as responsible for Iraq and the Middle East
as Vietnam
He was a mad man, not a realist. He paved the way for
disaster after disaster. We still think about him all wrong
Corey Robin
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/11/henry_kissinger_dangerous_fraud_why_hes_as_responsible_f
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Topics: Books, Henry Kissinger, New York Times, Niall Ferguson, Greg Grandin, American
History, Editor's Picks, Daniel Ellsberg, Barack Obama, Cambodia, Vietnam, Alexander Haig,
Robert McNamara, News

(Credit: AP)
Two weeks ago, a mini-scandal rocked the New York literary world. Gawker revealed that
Andrew Roberts, the New York Times Book Reviews choice to review the authorized biography
of Henry Kissinger, had in fact been Kissingers original choice to write the authorized
biography.
Roberts also was a long-time friend of Niall Ferguson, the man who Kissinger wound up
choosing to write his authorized biography. Roberts and Ferguson had even written a lengthy
chapter together in a volume of essays edited by Ferguson. Worse yet: Roberts had revealed
almost none of these involvements with Ferguson, with Kissinger to the New York Times
when it asked him to write the review.
So unseemly were these entanglements, and the lack of transparency about them, that Margaret
Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, felt called upon to rap the papers knuckles. Which
prompted a further back and forth between Sullivan and Pamela Paul, the editor of the Times
Book Review. While the back-scratching world of book reviews in the New York Times is an old
topic unlike other publications, the Times purports to be objective and untainted by personal
connections, and its reviews help promote or kill books this scandal brought it into especially
sharp relief.
The person who revealed the scandal in Gawker was Greg Grandin, an NYU historian and
winner of multiple academic and literary prizes. Grandin has his own book out on Kissinger,
Kissingers Shadow, which was reviewed by the Times the same day that Fergusons bio was.

By coincidence, I was scheduled to interview Grandin at the Brooklyn Public Library on the day
his review came out. I was thrilled by the prospect. (Full disclosure: Grandin and I are long-time
friends. Just in case you thought the personal dimensions of this story couldnt get any gummier.)
A lot of Kissinger commentary focuses on a simple-minded opposition between two traditions of
U.S. foreign policy: the realist tradition, which is hard-headed about power, human rights, and
Americas ability to do good in the world; and the idealist tradition, which believes the U.S.
should promote freedom and democracy around the globe.
Grandin shows how irrelevant that debate is. His Kissinger is neither a realist nor an idealist; his
Kissinger is a political existentialist. And where sentimentalists look back on Kissingers reign
as a time when wise men governed, Grandin shows that theres a direct link between the insanity
of Bushs Iraq War and Obamas endless wars and Kissingers insanity in Southeast Asia,
Latin America and Africa.
Beyond the novel interpretation Grandin offers of Kissinger, his book is a literary triumph, a
marriage of style and substance thats rare in books on U.S. foreign policy. Grandins chapter on
the deeply troubled and personal relationship between Kissinger and Daniel Ellsberg reads like
the opening act of a John Adams opera. Grandin manages to take a serious topic the
fantastically strange, and unnerving, worldview of Henry Kissinger and make it funny.
Kissingers Shadow is like Dr. Strangelove, but on paper. It shows you how scary Kissingers
reign truly was, but never lets you forget the farce that was the man.
What follows is an edited transcript of our interview at the Brooklyn Public Library.
Thereve been many books about Henry Kissinger, including critical treatments by
Christopher Hitchens and Seymour Hersh. Why do we need another book?
Kissinger is an outsized personality, and in these other books, he tends to outstrip the context.
You learn much about Kissinger, but not so much about the national security state that he
exemplifies. My book sees in Kissinger the workings of the larger system, the longer arc of postwar U.S. foreign policy.
But I want to also take on the notion that Kissinger is a foreign policy realist, that hes opposed
to the idealist strain of U.S. foreign policy. Kissinger is supposed to think the U.S. should only
get into battles it knows it can win, and should only do so in defense of its interests, not its
ideals. That notion of Kissinger the realist is often juxtaposed with the adventurism of the
neoconservatives who drove us into Iraq. I think thats a misrecognition of Kissinger, and my
book shows how.
Picking up on that, if theres a through-line in the book, its the senior thesis Kissinger
wrote when he was at Harvard in the late 1940s. Tell us about this thesis, and why its so
important to you?

He submitted it in 1950. It was the longest thesis in Harvards history. In fact, it supposedly
prompted the creation of the Kissinger rule, where you arent allowed to submit an
undergraduate thesis longer than 200 pages.
How long was it?
Four hundred pages.
You did say he was outsized.
It was a meditation on European philosophers and historians: Oswald Spengler, Immanuel Kant
and Arnold Toynbee. Its title was The Meaning of History, and it reflected its historical
moment. It has a strong flavour of post-war existentialism. You read it and you think of Sartre:
the idea that life is meaningless, has no purpose, that theres an emptiness to the universe, that
theres no moral order. But, like Sartre, Kissinger also believed that individuals could act freely
and that that the best way to achieve freedom was to accept that meaninglessness and emptiness
of history. Whats interesting about that thesis is that you can see how Kissinger refers back to it
throughout the years and in all of his critiques of how U.S. foreign policy was practiced.
You say hes a subjective irrationalist, a political existentialist. What does that mean?
Kissinger says that the past is a series of meaningless events and it is we in the present who
impose order on the past by our present concerns. He rejects any and all forms of determinism.
He also insists that there is a range of possibilities for action, that there is freedom.
This influences his ideas about diplomacy. The responsibility of statesmen is to recognize that
they have freedom to move, they shouldnt be constrained by the past, they shouldnt let the past
be a prison house of the present. He also believes and this is where he links up to
neoconservatism that action creates meaning, and that we states, statesmen, diplomats
dont know our interests until we act in the world.
Theres a circularity to Kissingers thought. Kissinger often is held up as somebody who believes
states should act out of a strong sense of interest and purpose. A constant critique that he makes
of whatever the current administration happens to be is that it knows how to project power but
doesnt know why it is projecting power. But if you start to peel back the layers and get at what
he means by purpose, theres no there there. Ultimately, he believes we have to project power
to create purpose and that our purpose is to project power. And thats a circularity that I think is
the motor force of American expansionism.
Again, a traditional realist is someone who believes that there are limits to power and that
states have interests, and that have have to operate within those limits to secure those
interests. You show that Kissinger has an animus to what underlies that view: namely,
cause and effect. He doesnt really believe that there are causes in the world that affect
things.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kissinger has this great line: There are two kinds of realists.
One that observes reality and responds to it, and the other that makes reality. And what the West
needs is the latter. That view was echoed by Karl Rove when he was in the Bush administration:
Were an empire now and when we act, we create reality.
This is all in the undergraduate thesis; he explicitly rejects the idea of cause and effect, of
causality. We cant think of the present as the cumulative effect of past actions because the past
didnt cause the present, because nothing causes anything. So you cant allow the past to
determine or even shape what you do in the present; you can dispense with the past.
You can see that idea with someone like Cheney, who will look at Iraq today and say, Look, we
can debate what we did twelve or thirteen years ago, whether we were right or wrong. But theres
a crisis now, and we have to act now to solve that crisis. Thats Kissingerism: statesmen
shouldnt let yesterdays catastrophe get in the way of todays bold action.
Lets jump ahead to Kissinger in Cambodia, which is probably the biggest foreign policy
issue that you deal with in the book. Why does Kissinger in Cambodia matter so much for
you?
For a number of reasons:
Kissinger and Nixon took office in early 1969, and one of the first things they want to do is force
North Vietnam back to the bargaining table. How are you going to do that? You cant start
bombing North Vietnam right away; they had to honor the cease-fire. So they bombed
Cambodia. But they had to bomb Cambodia illegally because they were afraid of public
opposition and congressional disapproval.
So Kissinger, along his military aide Al Haig and an air force colonel, came up with a double
bookkeeping protocol that allowed them to bomb Cambodia illegally for an extended period,
allowing them to account for the munitions, spare parts and fuel they used without revealing
to Congress that they were bombing Cambodia. Kissinger was intimately involved. He picked
the targets from the basement of the White House.
Cambodia encapsulates the circularity of American intervention perfectly: we have to escalate so
we can de-escalate. But the bombing did the opposite. It led to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia,
which accelerated the crisis in Cambodia and ultimately contributed to the rise of the Khmer
Rouge.
The justifications Kissinger has offered for the bombing have an interesting and long afterlife.
He said we were bombing Cambodia, a neutral country, in order to deny the North Vietnamese
sanctuary. Last year, on a book tour, an interviewer asked Kissinger about Cambodia. Kissinger
answered that if you want to understand Cambodia, look at Obamas drone program. Obama,
says Kissinger, is justifying his actions in Yemen and Pakistan and Somalia on the same terms
that I did in Cambodia: you have to destroy the sanctuaries and safe havens of our enemies, even
if those havens are in neutral countries. So Kissinger was invoking todays wars in order to

justify what he did forty years ago, but what he did forty years ago helped pave the way for
todays wars.
In his time, though, Kissinger had to keep his wars secret Cambodia is the perfect example
and his justifications were largely made in secret. They were considered so far out of the
mainstream that even establishment colleagues broke with him. Today theyre mainstream
arguments, which Obama makes.
Thats the opening set piece of the book. Thomas Schelling and all these Harvard
establishment types, Kissingers former colleagues and friends, come to Kissinger to oppose
the invasion of Cambodia, which Nixon has just announced publicly. They dont even know
about the bombing. The justification for the invasion is that Cambodia is providing
sanctuaries for the North Vietnamese. Schelling says, As we see it, there are two
possibilities: Either, one, the president didnt understand when he went into Cambodia that
he was invading another country; or two, he did understand. We just dont know which one
is scarier. As you show, the whole notion of invading a neutral country because it was
providing sanctuaries to Americas enemy was shocking to the Establishment.
Exactly, except now Obama states it as a commonplace: our enemies will find no safe haven.
That was, with Bush, the justification for Afghanistan. Its the justification for what we do in
Pakistan, etc.
You have a chapter called Anti-Kissinger. Anti-Kissinger is Daniel Ellsberg. Theres a
relationship between these two Ellsberg and Kissinger thats the moral heart of the
book. Tell us about Ellsberg and Ellsberg and McNamara: What did they represent for
Kissinger?
It goes back to that undergraduate thesis, in which Kissinger draws heavily from Spengler, the
German philosopher of history. One of Spenglers criticisms is that great civilizations, at the
moment of decline, will give themselves over to the accountants, the bureaucrats, the
instrumentalists who have no understanding of the empires larger purpose; the real sources of an
empires power are its poets and priests and soldiers. Kissinger embraced Spenglers critique, but
he rejected the fatalism. He didnt think that decline was inevitable: great men can intervene
indeed, they have the responsibility to do so in history, slowing the decline or even reversing
it.
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Before he came to the Pentagon, Robert McNamara was at Ford Motor Company. He believed in
all the things that Spengler and Kissinger hated. He believed in numbers, in gathering data,
in giving an accounting of the Pentagons tactics, its expenditures, everything. He didnt believe
in intuition or the intangibles of war; he didnt believe in the will or spirit. And Kissingers
critique of McNamara was that he could project power but he did not know why he was
projecting power. And that led to McNamaras fatal flaw: he had no stomach for endless war.

Ellsberg is a much more intimate challenge for Kissinger than McNamara was, since their lives
are so intertwined. They both went to Harvard; they both were products of the post-war
meritocracy. Ellsberg spoke to Kissingers class at Harvard. Ellsberg was one of the first people
to give Kissinger a tour and briefing about Vietnam during Kissingers first visit to the country in
1965. But if you look at Kissingers undergraduate thesis, you see that Ellsberg, who uses
economic analysis, who cares about numbers and data, Ellsberg is doing exactly the kind of thing
that Kissinger says is the sign of an empire in decline. Ellsberg is exactly the kind of fact man
Kissinger (and Spengler) warned against.
Heres how Ellsberg, who helped pioneer game theory, wrote: For any given probability
distribution, the probability of outcome a with action III is p(A C) = PA + PC. Thats what
Kissinger hated.
When Kissinger becomes national security adviser, Ellsberg tells him: This is what you gotta do.
You gotta bombard the bureaucracy with questionnaires. The point is not the answers that come
back. The point is to establish dominance over the bureaucracy, to force them to answer your
questions, and to reveal any potential information or tensions that you can then use against them.
Kissinger liked this idea and he applied it. When all the questionnaires came back, he let Ellsberg
collate them. And what Ellsberg had was evidence of an unbelievable and insurmountable
pessimism in the bureaucracy, the sense that the US had no viable options in Vietnam. Kissinger
had basically given Ellsberg permission to data mine the bureaucracy. This created more
pessimism and contributed to a sense of siege within the White House. Ellsberg leaked the
results to different congressmen. It was like a little pre-Pentagon Paper.
And the Pentagon Papers, to go back to McNamara for a minute, were Kissingers worst
Spenglerian fever dream. Commissioned by McNamara, they were written by a team of
bureaucrats, of area experts who actually had knowledge of the country, knowledge that was
based on facts and data. Kissinger thought that kind of knowledge instilled a sense of guilt and
second thoughts. And that was his critique of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy was inherently riskaverse; it cares about information and too much information creates a crisis of doubt and
confidence. Thats why you have to avoid too much bureaucracy and information, thats why you
have to act.
What I loved about that chapter is that you show that Kissinger thinks hes doing the
Kissinger-ian thing by, as you say, ignoring the data and only using it to establish his
supremacy in the national security bureaucracy. But what happens is the information
the very thing that Kissinger hated but that he had allowed Ellsberg to procure comes to
constrain Kissinger. It ties him down in the way he predicted it would, yet he was the one
who was responsible for getting it. And you also show that Ellsberg, who was supposed to
be a witless numbers man, an accountant, is able to play the great game of politics better
than Kissinger, the master statesman. Its these kinds of ironies that make your book such a
pleasure to read.
Thanks.

Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate
Center. Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and
Fear: The History of a Political Idea, he is currently writing a book about Clarence Thomas.