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INTRODUCTION
ON 2 DECEMBER
1998, Mr Michael Korda was being interviewed on
camera in his office at Simon and 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, Joan Crawford and Jo
Bonanno. On this particular day, he was talking about the life and
thoughts
of Cher, whose portrait adorned the wall behind him. And then the tele-
phone 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 fol-
lowing 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 all 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 ques-
tion about that, as uncomfortable as it may be. ... Henry, this is
totally
outrageous ...yeah. ... Also the jurisdiction. This is a Spanish judge
appealing 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 docu-
ment. ... 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 con-
sultancy 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 2 December
1998, its front page carried the following report from Tim Weiner, the
paper's national security correspondent in Washington. Under the
headline
"U.S. Will Release Files on Crimes Under Pinochet;" he wrote:
Treading 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 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
inter-
national 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
Gerald 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:
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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 secretary, 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
harboring 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
unbear-
ably dull and self regarding title Years of Renewal) that was still in
progress.
"Harboring and
sheltering;' though, are understatements for the lav-
ishness of Henry Kissinger's circumstances. His advice is sought, at
$25,000
an appearance, by audiences of businessmen and academics and policy-
makers. 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 host-
esses who solicit Kissinger's company, or perhaps one should say
society, for
those telling New York soirees. 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"). Fawned 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 "mold" 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 portraiture 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 drily 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 -anyone
of these can instantly spoil his day. As we see from the Korda tape,
Kissinger
cannot open the morning paper with the assurance of tranquility.
Because
he knows what others can only suspect, or guess at. He knows. And he is
a
prisoner of ~he knowledge as, to some extent, are we.
Notice the
likeable way in which Mr Korda demonstrates his broad-
mindedness 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
melan-
choly 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
politi-
cians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and
clerics 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
secondhand darts). No, he is sought after because his presence supplies
a
frisson: 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 trib-
ute, he flaunts not the "aphrodisiac" of power ( another of his
plagiarized
bons mots) but its pornography.
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