THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

APPENDIX I:  A FRAGRANT FRAGMENT

I AM TAKING the liberty of reproducing a correspondence, initially
between Henry Kissinger and myself, which began in the New York Times
Book Review in the fall of the year 2000. In a review (reprinted below) of
The Arrogance of Power, the work by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
to which direct reference is made on page 13 of this book, 1 had essentially
summarized and condensed the case against Nixon's and Kissinger's private
and illicit diplomacy during the 1968 election; a case made much more
fully in Chapter 1 here [see pages 8-15]. I also made reference to some
other Nixon-era crimes and misdemeanors.

This drew a rather lengthy and -to put it no higher distinctly bizarre
reply from Kissinger. Its full text is also appended, together with the
responses that it occasioned in its turn. (I have no means of knowing why
Kissinger recruited former General Brent Scow croft as his co-signer, unless
it was for the reassurance of human company as well as the solidarity of a
well-rewarded partner in the firm of Kissinger Associates.)

The correspondence makes three convenient points. It undermines
pseudo-lofty attempts by Kissinger and his defenders to pretend that this
book, or better say the arguments contained in it, are beneath their notice.
They have already attempted to engage, in other words, and have with-
drawn in disorder. Second, it shows the extraordinary mendacity, and
reliance upon mendacity and upon non-credible but hysterical denial, that
characterizes the Kissinger style. Third, it supplies another small window
into the nauseating record of "rogue state" internal affairs.

Review by Christopher Hitchens
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.
Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan.

In one respect at least, the memoirs of Henry Kissinger agree with Sideshow,
William Shawcross's report on the bombing of Cambodia. Both books
confirm that Richard Nixon rather liked people to fear his own madness. In
the fall of 1969, for example, he told Kissinger to warn the Soviet ambas-
sador that the President was "out of control" on Indochina, and capable of
anything. Kissinger claims that he regarded the assignment as "too dan-
gerous" to carry out. But, as Anthony Summers now instructs us:

Three months earlier, however, Kissinger had sent that very same message by
proxy when he instructed Len Garment, about to leave on a trip to Moscow,
to give the Soviets "the impression that Nixon is somewhat 'crazy' -
immensely intelligent, well organized and experienced to be sure, but at
moments of stress or personal challenge unpredictable and capable of the
bloodiest brutality." Garment carried out the mission, telling a senior
Brezhnev advisor that Nixon was "a dramatically disjointed personality. ..
more than a little paranoid. ..when necessary, a cold-hearted butcher." The
irony, the former aide reflected ruefully in 1997, was that everything he had
told the Russians turned out to be "more or less true."

The great merit of The Arrogance of Power is that it takes much of what we
already knew, or thought we knew (or darkly suspected), and refines and
confirms and extends it. The inescapable conclusion, well bodyguarded
by meticulous research and footnotes, is that in the Nixon era the United
States was, in essence, a "rogue state." It had a ruthless, paranoid and unsta-
ble leader who did not hesitate to break the laws of his own country in
order to violate the neutrality, menace the territorial integrity or destabilize
the internal affairs of other nations. At the close of this man's reign, in an
episode more typical of a banana republic or a "people's democracy;' his
own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, had to instruct the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to disregard any military order originating in the White House.

Schlesinger had excellent grounds for circumspection. Not only had he
learned that Nixon had asked the Joint Chiefs "whether in a crunch there was
support to keep him in power," but he had also been told the following by
Joseph Laitin, public affairs spokesman of the Office of Management and
Budget. On his way to the West Wing in the spring of 1974, Laitin recalls:

I'd reached the basement, near the Situation Room. And just as I was about
to ascend the stairway, a guy came running down the stairs two steps at a
time. He had a frantic look on his face, wild-eyed, like a madman. And he
bowled me over, so I kind of lost my balance. And before I could pick myself
up, six athletic-looking young men leapt over me, pursuing him. I suddenly
realized that they were Secret Service agents, that I'd been knocked over by
the president of the United States.

Summers, a former BBC correspondent who has written biographies of
Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover, makes us almost spoiled for choice
as we seek an explanation for this delirious interlude and others like it.
Nixon might have been intoxicated; it took very little alcohol to make him
belligerent, and he became even more thuggish and incoherent when he
threw in a few sleeping pills as well. He might have been hypermedicated,
and he may have helped himself to a very volatile anticonvulsant called
Dilantin, given to him by a campaign donor rather than prescribed by a
physician. He might have been in a depressive or psychotic state; for three
decades and in great secrecy he consulted a psychotherapist named Dr
Arnold A. Hutschnecker. He may even have believed the Jews were after
him; on numberless occasions he used his dirtiest mouth to curse at Jewish
plots and individuals.

The most arresting chapter gives us conclusive reason to believe that
Nixon and his associates -especially Attorney General John Mitchell and
Vice President Spiro Agnew -consciously sabotaged the Vietnam peace
negotiations in Paris in the fall of 1968. Elements of this story have surfaced
before, in books by -- among others -- Clark Clifford and Richard
Holbrooke, Seymour Hersh and William Bundy. But this is the most con-
vincing account to have appeared so far, relying as it does on wiretaps
released to Summers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many senior
Democrats knew this ghastly secret but kept it to themselves, if only
because L.B.J. had lawfully -- if shamefacedly -- bugged Nixon and his co-
conspirators, as well as the South Vietnamese embassy. (The FBI intercept
cables are reproduced here.)

Using a series of extremist and shady intermediaries, the Nixon cam-
paign covertly assured the South Vietnamese generals that if they boycotted
President Lyndon B. Johnson's dearly bought conference ( which they ulti-
mately did on the very eve of the election) they would get a more
sympathetic administration. Irony is too feeble a word for what they actu-
ally got: a losing war, protracted for four years and concluded -with much
additional humiliation -on the same terms that Johnson and Hubert
Humphrey had been offering in 1968. Summers has spoken to all the sur-
viving participants, including the dramatic go-between figure of Anna
Chennault, who now regards even herself as one of those betrayed by this
foul deal. Almost half the names on that wall in Washington are inscribed
with a date after Nixon and Kissinger took office. We still cringe from
counting the number of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. Nixon's
illegal and surreptitious conduct not only prolonged an awful war but also
corrupted and subverted a crucial presidential election: the combination
must make it the most wicked action in American history.

Summers speculates that fear of disclosure might supply the motive
for the Watergate burglary, an element in the tainting of yet a second elec-
tion. Again, though, he spoils us for choice. If Nixon's mobsters were not
looking for Democratic opposition research on the 1968 treason, they were
looking for evidence that the Democrats either knew about bribes to the
president from Howard Hughes or, much more probably, that they knew
about secret subventions paid to Nixon and Agnew by the Greek military
dictatorship. Nice choices, you will agree; it has taken some effort to narrow
them down to those tasteful three ( with a side bet on a prostitution racket
that would have implicated both major parties).

For connoisseurs there is more detail -- about the shenanigans of
Nixon's crony, Bebe Rebozo, in the Bahamas; about underhand dealing
with the Mafia in Cuba; and about the slow public martyrdom of Mrs
Nixon, who, Summers says, may have been a victim of physical as well as
mental cruelty.  Too often for my taste, Summers employs the weasel word
"reportedly," which ought to be banned.  But he usually goes no farther than
his evidence. And two serious and consistent themes assert themselves.
Richard Nixon was able, time and again, to employ overseas entangle-
ments to make end runs around American democracy. Short of money?
shah, or the Greek junta, or some friendly but inconvenienced multi-
national, will provide the dough, redeemable in arms trades or rakeoffs or
an imaginative new line on human rights. Stuck for an issue? Embrace the
very despots -- Brezhnev or Mao -- whose demonization has fueled your
career thus far. Polls narrowing? Sell your own country by conducting off-
the-record two-track diplomacy with tinpot clients, as in 1968.

The second theme involves an attraction to violence that perhaps only
Huts..:hnc(kcr's posthumous notes will explain. Like many law-and-order
types, Nixon had a relish for rough stuff and police provocation. He seems
to have helped encourage the mayhem that both disfigured and transfigured
his tour of Latin America as vice president in 1958. As president, he can be
heard on tape agreeing to the employment of Teamster bullies to batter
antiwar demonstrators ("Yeah. ...They've got guys who'll go in and knock
their heads off"). This is the same duplicitous, gloating, insecure man who
embellished his own mediocre war record in order to run for Congress, who
adored obscene talk but was a poor hand with the fair sex, and who affected
cloth-coat austerity while dabbling all his life in slush funds. A small man
who claimed to be for the little guy, but was at the service of the fat cats. A
pseudo-intellectual who hated and resented the real thing. Summers has
completed the work of many predecessors, and made the task of his succes-
sors very difficult. In the process, he has done an enormous service by
describing, to the citizens of a nation founded on law and right, the precise
obscenity of that moment when the jutting jaw of a would-be Caesar col-
lapses into the slobbering underlip of a weak and self-pitying king.

In Defense of Nixon

To the Editor:

We would like to raise some questions of fact about Christopher
Hitchens's tendentious account of a tendentious book, Anthony Summers's
"Arrogance of Power" (Oct. 8).

1. Neither of us was associated with Richard Nixon during the 1968
election campaign, but the allegations that he blocked a Johnson adminis-
tration Vietnam peace initiative remain, in our view, allegations
unsubstantiated by persuasive evidence. In any case, the record shows that
the South Vietnamese foot-dragging (alleged to be at the behest of Nixon
underlings) -even if the account were true -could not have had the con-
sequences that Summers claims. The expanded Paris peace talks began in
early November, and any delay was therefore very brief; Nixon -as
president-elect and at the peak of his leverage -encouraged President
Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to cooperate with the Johnson
administration. Moreover, if the issue is political motivation, any discus-
sion of this question has to begin with the indications from Soviet archives
that Soviet leaders were led to believe that a main motive of rushing the
bombing halt and peace talks was to get Hubert Humphrey elected.

2. It also needs to be borne in mind that the expanded Paris talks, once
they began, were about procedure, not substance. Those talks immediately
deadlocked, not on the substance of how to end the war but on whether the
Vietcong guerrillas should have the same status at the table as the govern-
ment of South Vietnam. No substantive proposal of any kind was put
forward by the Johnson administration. It is therefore nonsense to assert
that Nixon in 1972 achieved no better terms than what Lyndon Johnson
was "offering" in 1968. (Hanoi rejected compromise terms until 1972.)

3. The reviewer plays the usual numbers game with American soldiers
killed in action, claiming that nearly half occurred on Nixon's watch. One-
third would be more nearly accurate. But that is not the essence of the
misrepresentation. When Nixon came into office, America had already suf-
fered 36,000 soldiers killed in action. Of the 20,000 killed in the Nixon period,
12,000 occurred in the first year before any new policy could take effect, 9,000
in the first six months -- clear legacies of the previous administration. When
Nixon came in, American soldiers killed in action had run at an average rate
of 1,500 per month for a year. At the end of his first term, they had been
reduced to 50 per month. When Nixon entered office, American troops in
Vietnam stood at 525,000 and were still increasing according to plans made in
the Johnson administration. In 1972, they had been reduced to 25,000.

4. The Nixon administration concluded the first strategic arms control
agreement and the first agreement banning biological weapons; opened
relations with China; ended the decades-long crisis over Berlin; launched
the Arab-Israeli peace process; and initiated the Helsinki negotiations,
generally accepted as weakening the Soviets' control of their satellite empire
and fostering German unification. Are these the actions of a "rogue" leader,
as Hitchens calls Nixon?

5. Nixon was a strategist. He did want the notion to get around, as a strate-
gic ploy, that if provoked by a foreign aggressor, he might respond
disproportionately. But it is important here to separate the Nixon who some-
times expressed extreme statements to his confidants for dramatic or rhetorical
effect and the Nixon who never made a really serious international move
without the most careful and cautious analysis. It is laughable to imagine
Richard Nixon ordering a domestic coup. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger
did apparently in Nixon's last days direct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore
orders from their commander in chief an unprecedented arrogation of
authority. Whatever his motives, Schlesinger never came to either of us ( or
anyone else, so far as we know) with his concerns and what to do about them.

6. As for the story by Joe Laitin ( a close associate of Schlesinger) that
a frenetic Nixon came tearing down the stairs two at a time, pursued by
six Secret Service agents, and literally knocked Laitin over -- no way.
Nixon could not have gone down a set of stairs two at a time if his life
depended on it.

HENRY A. KISSINGER
New York
BRENT Scow CROFT
Washington
[November 5, 2000]

Nixon Descending

To the Editor:

In reading Henry A. Kissinger and Brent SCOW croft's spirited defense of
Richard Nixon (Letters, Nov. 5), I was surprised that they felt it necessary
in making their case to say I had fabricated the details of my strange
encounter with the president. I was there; they weren't.

However, they miss the point. Whether the president bowled me over or
not is unimportant. I cannot swear that he was descending the stairs two at
a time, three at a time or one at a time. All I can say is that the desperate
look on his face as he was pursued by the Secret Service agents alarmed me
and prompted my call to Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Because I
had direct access to Schlesinger, having worked with him for years, I was
able to report the raw details of the incident immediately after it hap-
pened. As Kissinger and Scow croft well know, history cannot be tampered
with, and suggesting I lied about my encounter with President Nixon can't
change what actually took place.

JOE LAITIN
Bethesda, Md.
[November 19, 2000]

Nixoniana

To the Editor:

In his and Brent Scowcroft's letter (Nov. 5), former Secretary of State
Henry A. Kissinger denied having been associated with Defense Secretary
James Schlesinger in directing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore orders
from President Richard Nixon. As one who during 1973-75 served on one
of the Battle Staff units, on permanent standby to brief the president and
top commanders in the event of a nuclear crisis, I know otherwise. As I
have testified in secret debriefings and in both open and closed sessions of
House and Senate committees as far back as 1975, Kissinger signed or
countersigned at least three such orders in the final year of the Nixon pres-
idency. I have so testified under penalty of perjury several times.

After the first such order in 1973 signed by Kissinger, the Joint Chiefs
demanded that any subsequent ones be countersigned by at least one other
Nixon cabinet officer. A second such order, again an instruction not to
obey the president until further notice, was signed by Kissinger and, to the
best of my recollection, Elliot Richardson. At least one other was jointly
signed by Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger. Such orders were
always sent "Top Secret, Eyes Only, Limited Distribution;' bypassing other
traffic. Sometimes they remained in effect for a week, most times only two
to four days. The orders were issued at times of perceived Nixon mental
instability, I repeatedly received them in my own hands, as did numerous
others serving in sensitive nuclear control positions during that last horrific
year of the Nixon presidency.

BARRY A. TOLL
Painesville, Ohio
[December 12, 2000]

To the Editor:

The letter by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scow croft, referring to our
Nixon biography, "The Arrogance of Power;' was an inept barrage. They
assert that allegations of Nixonian sabotage of the 1968 Johnson peace
effort are "unsubstantiated by persuasive evidence;' then fail to counter any
of our detailed analysis -which includes the recently released record of
F.B.I. surveillance conducted on the eve of the election that brought Nixon
to power.

Kissinger and Scow croft cite Soviet archival sources, of all things, to
insinuate that the Johnson peace initiative was just a political ploy "to get
Hubert Humphrey elected." Any reading of the record of the pivotal White
House meetings, available at the Johnson Library, dispels that notion. But
even if that had been the case, it would not mitigate the offense indicated
by the mass of information suggesting that Nixon did the unconscionable
-as an unelected political candidate he meddled in the government's con-
duct of highly sensitive peace negotiations.

Readers of our book will find that we account, page by page, for our
sources -which included more than a thousand interviews. Had Kissinger
granted us an interview, we would have faithfully reported his views on rel-
evant matters. We made nine written requests over a two-year period, but
he ducked and weaved and never came through.

ANTHONY SUMMERS
ROBBYN SWAN
Cappoquin, Ireland
[December 12, 2000]

Unpublished

To the Editor:

I suppose it is a distinction of some sort to be attacked at such length by
Henry Kissinger and (for some reason) his business partner General Brent
Scow croft. It is certainly fascinating to see the evident nervousness with
which they approach the allegations I made.

The record of Henry Kissinger's underhand involvement with the Nixon
presidential campaign of 1968 is so extensively documented by now,
including by Nixon himself, that one rubs the bleary eyes to read a denial
of it. "Neither of us," write the two men, "was associated" with that
campaign. Misery is said to love company; I have never bothered to inquire
whether General Scow croft played any part in that unhappy episode but his
own modesty -perhaps disappointment -only serves to put his co-
author's credibility in starker contrast with the facts. Mr Kissinger was
hired as Nixon's principal advisor for national security as soon as the elec-
tion was over, even though the two men had met only once. It was,
moreover, Nixon's first appointment. Does Kissinger now deny that this
was unconnected to the many surreptitious services performed by him,
from Paris, for John Mitchell and for Nixon himself? If so, the flabbergast-
ing denial of established facts would be interesting only insofar as it
suggested something hitherto unguessed-at: the prickings of an uneasy
conscience.

I make this perhaps unwarrantable suggestion because of a peculiar
formulation later in the same paragraph, where Mr Kissinger (I've done
with Scow croft for now), says that:

the record shows that the South Vietnamese foot-dragging (alleged to be at
the behest of Nixon underlings) -- even if the account were true -- could not
have had the consequence that Summers claims. The expanded Paris peace
talks began in early November, and any delay was therefore very brief; Nixon
-- as president-elect and at the peak of his leverage -- encouraged President
Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam to cooperate with the Johnson admin-
istration. (Italics added.)

This is a finely crafted paragraph and no mistake. But it is also very dis-
honestly argued. The South Vietnamese foot-dragging is not "alleged" but
has been asserted and extensively documented. If the other emphasis of
"alleged " is the intended one, then it was not at the "behest of underlings"
-the now-familiar "deniable" scheme whereby the chief is never told what
his deputies do -but at the direct instigation of Nixon himself. This has
been solidly phrased by many Democratic and Republican high-level
participants in these momentous events, and is not challenged, let alone
rebutted, by Kissinger. "Early November" may sound suitably autumnal as
a description of the seasonal setting of these same events, but it stretches to
cover the date of the election itself and is thus designed to obscure what it
purports to illuminate. What Kissinger means is that in the short interval
when the actual "foot-dragging" took place, and as a thinkable conse-
quence of that precise interval, one regime replaced another in the White
House. That is, after all, the whole hypothesis (and the whole accusation)
in the first place. Once President, Nixon did indeed appear to hew to the
Johnson line -which is another element in the case against him and his
newly promoted "National Security Advisor;' who had no principled dif-
ferences with that line to begin with.

The preceding and succeeding passages also betray unease. Kissinger
does not say that there is no evidence for this grave allegation. He says that
the evidence is not persuasive. Does he care to say what is unpersuasive
about the evidence adduced by so many historians and participants, from
the hawkish Bundy and Haldeman to the more skeptical Clark Clifford?
Evidently he does not. Instead, there comes a breathtaking and highly sug-
gestive change of subject:

If the issue is political motivation, any discussion of this question has to
begin with the indications from Soviet archives that Soviet leaders were led
to believe that a main motive of rushing the bombing halt and peace talks
was to get Hubert Humphrey elected. (Italics in original.)

This clumsily constructed sentence deserves a close parsing. Apparently,
political motivation is an allowable sub-text of the argument over the Paris
negotiations after all, since if it can be alleged -actually only suggested -
about the Democratic incumbents it can also surely be alleged about their
Republican opponents. So one is grateful for Kissinger's perhaps inadver-
tent concession of common ground. However, if the Johnson-Humphrey
regime sought to time the talks for their own electoral purposes (and this
writer was not and is not in any position to approve of anything they
undertook) then they did so in public view, and as the legally elected and
constituted government of the United States. In that capacity, too, they
would have been subject to the judgment of the voters as to their likely
opportunism. Whereas Messrs Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell and Kissinger (only
one of them so far unindicted for one abuse of power or another) would
have been conducting a "diplomacy" with unaccredited interlocutors, ille-
gal under the Logan Act, concealed not only from both the public and
denominated negotiators of the country but also from its electorate! This
indeed is part of the essential gravamen of the charge. To put the two
notions on the same footing, and to lard them with vague and unsup-
ported innuendoes about "Soviet" knowledge, is to take the same attitude
to the United States Constitution that Kissinger was later to adopt towards
the Chilean one.

It is obviously true to say, in a military-technocratic sense, that there is
some extensive cross-over between the war as waged by Johnson and
Humphrey and the war as "inherited" by Nixon and Kissinger. To that
extent, some of the assertions of point (3) need not be disputed. ("One-
third would be more nearly accurate." Good grief -so Kissinger has been
counting them after all, while daring to accuse me of playing "the usual
numbers game.") However, if the "legacy" transmitted from one adminis-
tration to the next was indeed passed through a filter of illegal secret
dealing with an undisclosed third power -as has been authoritatively
argued, and as the outgoing administration certainly believed -and if the
effect of this was to enhance the level of violence rather than to diminish it,
then the case for regarding Mr Kissinger as a war criminal, careless only of
American deaths, is complete on those terms alone.

Your readers might care to note that in seeking further to dilute the
above implications, he says nothing to my original point about hugely
increased Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian casualties during the years
1969-1975; a period when the war and its devastation was extended into
large new tracts of formerly neutral and civilian territory. Such an omission
cannot be accidental; it is the sort of "oversight" which results from a racist
world-view and hopes -- I am sure in vain -- to concentrate the attention
and sympathy of your audience only upon its "own" losses.

The remaining paragraphs of his letter are replete with boilerplate
propaganda and pitiful falsehood, much of it ably disposed of by the later
letters you have printed from Mr Laitin and Mr Toll. My forthcoming
book The Trial of Henry Kissinger will, I hope, supply the refutation of the
residual claims.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Washington, DC

[A PS for readers: I do not complain of not seeing my own letter in print;
it was excessively lengthy and I had already had my say in the columns of
the Book Review. I also delayed too long in sending it, in case Kissinger - or
even the hapless Scowcroft -- might choose to take on the annihilating
replies they had received from Laitin and Toll. But answer came there none,
so I allowed myself the satisfaction of finishing an argument Kissinger had
started and then abandoned.]

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