NIXON-KISSINGER TREASON IN VIETNAM – EVIL SHADOW OF DARKNESS

On January 23, 2016, I recall the historical announcement made by President Richard M Nixon on January 23, 1973. Both President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger fully recognized that the United States military campaign using aerial bombardment was not making its expected impact. United States was not able to stop the flow of war supplies into North Vietnam. It is no surprise for Nixon-Kissinger team had failed in their duty to identify the ‘ENEMY’. Success in Warfare is practically impossible without knowing Enemy. In Vietnam War, North Vietnam was not the chief opponent. As the United States engaged in  brutal, bloody, and costly War to arrest the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, for all practical purposes, ‘ENEMY’ is defined as Communist Powers, namely, Soviet Union, and Communist China. North Vietnam was able to fight against the United States as the War was fought with full support from Soviet Union and Communist China. US campaign of aerial bombardment of North Vietnam was not working for it failed to put a dent on Enemy’s war effort. At that critical juncture, from July 1971, Nixon-Kissinger embraced a course of action to betray the United States and provide aid and comfort to Communist China which was fully engaged in sending military supplies to North Vietnam to injure and kill Americans defending South Vietnam. Nixon-Kissinger ensured ‘The Fall of Saigon’ and denied opportunity to the United States to conclude Vietnam War without losing Pride, Honor, and Dignity of Americans who gave their precious lives, and limbs to defend Freedom and Democracy opposed by Communism. I ask my readers to note that Dr. Henry Alfred Kissinger was appointed as the US Secretary of State during September 1973. His secret diplomacy and his actions involving meeting foreign Heads of State between 1969 to September 1973 are illegal as per the US Constitutional Law.

Rudranarasimham Rebbapragada
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-4162 USA
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THE WASHINGTON POST

KISSINGER: THE DR. FRANKENSTEIN OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, OR JUST SELF-PROMOTER?

 

BY EVAN THOMAS

Evan Thomas is the author of “Being Nixon: A Man Divided.”

KISSINGER’S SHADOW – THE LONG REACH OF AMERICA’S MOST CONTROVERSIAL STATESMAN

BY GREG GRANDIN

Metropolitan. 270 pp. $28

Henry Kissinger has not held high government office since 1977, almost 40 years ago. True, he accomplished a great deal during his eight years as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations — for better (opening China, arms control with the Soviet Union, peace in the Middle East) or for worse (secret bombings and cold-blooded diplomacy that, some scholars argue, contributed to genocidal outcomes in Bangladesh and Cambodia). Nonetheless, it is remarkable how visible, even at age 92, Kissinger remains.

Conservatives who once denounced him as a dangerous appeaser now seek his autograph and blessing, especially if they’re running for president and want access to his pals in the New York money crowd. He has not lost his power to charm. Just over a year ago, Samantha Power, President Obama’s human-rights-activist ambassador to the United Nations, went to a New York Yankees game with Kissinger. The two reportedly engaged in light banter about the geopolitical symbolism of their baseball fandom (Kissinger backing the historically hegemonic Yankees, Power rooting for the less-fortunate Boston Red Sox).

‘Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman’ by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan)

Greg Grandin, an accomplished historian, wants us to think of Kissinger as the Dr. Frankenstein of foreign affairs. He blames Kissinger and “Kissingerism” for a perpetual national security state that engages in “constant, unending war” and has coarsened our national morality. Kissinger, Grandin argues, has accomplished this by the power of his personality and undeniable brilliance — and by metaphysics. Deconstructing Kissinger’s 1950 PhD thesis, which Grandin contends still informs his worldview, the author argues that Kissinger has touched on the “most American of conceits: self-creation.” With his funereal German accent and fond allusions to Metternich and the Congress of Vienna, he sounds like a gloomy Old World realist resigned to cynical zero-sum games. Actually, he believes that since life is “ultimately meaningless and . . . history is tragic,” Americans — or right-thinking ones — are free to endlessly shape their own reality, or so Grandin argues. Meaning comes from the exercise of power; morality is mostly what you make it. There are a few limits, but most can be ignored — the key is to act. Grandin would have us believe that Kissinger laid the foundation for a national security state that is in constant motion, with spy satellites and drones relentlessly attacking our enemies and creating new ones.

Grandin is a persuasive polemicist, and he has a lot of material to work with. It is hard not to cringe while reading transcripts of White House tapes that recorded Kissinger and President Richard Nixon cynically talking about a “decent interval” in Vietnam — building in enough time between America’s exit and the inevitable fall of Saigon to protect Nixon’s political fortunes.

Grandin reports on a conversation between Kissinger and Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong, the ultimate cynic. Mao and Kissinger, Grandin writes, “shared a mutual appreciation of German metaphysics.” In November 1973, after the Vietnam War was over, Mao said to Kissinger, “You are now freer than before,” meaning that with the war ended and Nixon reelected by a landslide, the Americans were freer to do what they wanted on the world stage. “Much more,” Kissinger replied. You can almost picture him rubbing his hands! But the cost, Grandin argues, drawing heavily on the work of Seymour Hersh (“The Price of Power”), was genocide in Cambodia.

Grandin, a professor at New York University, is one of a small group of academics who defy the stereotype of a turgid, jargon-ridden pedant whose prose is accessible only to his colleagues (and not always to them). Writing fluently on an interesting variety of topics, Grandin has escaped narrow specialization. He is the author of well-regarded books as wide-ranging as “Fordlandia,” about Henry Ford’s misbegotten attempt to build a middle-class suburbia in the Brazilian rain forest, and “The Empire of Necessity,” about African slavery. He writes with literary flair and a sharp eye for the absurdities of politics. But he has perhaps credited the protean Kissinger with too much sinister influence.

Grandin acknowledges that the national security state existed before Kissinger came along, but he slides past just how secretive and powerful it was. When Franklin Roosevelt wanted to help Britain before Pearl Harbor, he was not shy about bending the rules. President Dwight Eisenhower, to his later regret, virtually gave carte blanche to the CIA to conduct covert operations around the world. Congress looked the other way as CIA operatives overthrew governments in Guatemala and Iran and tried to do the same in several other countries.

President Lyndon Johnson lied so much and so often about Vietnam that he opened the Credibility Gap, which gave rise to the aggressive journalism that brought down Nixon. At the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover ran a personal empire with bugging and black-bag jobs, not to mention unsubtle blackmailing of politicians with secrets to hide.

Kissinger did help reinvent and legitimize the national security machinery after Watergate and the 1975 revelations of the Church Committee on abuses in intelligence-gathering. He has been a persistent presence in influential journals and has served as an informal adviser to presidents and their deputies. But it gives him entirely too much credit — or blame — to suggest that his metaphysical musings, however backed by force of will, have so permeated the national security establishment that we live in his permanent shadow. He has made a lot of money as a strategic consultant, and he has remarkable access to policymakers and aspiring presidents. But Kissingerism is hardly U.S. foreign policy dogma. Indeed, the prevailing political stance now seems to be against a true boots-on-the-ground war with the Islamic State.

Kissinger is one of the most influential and fascinating men of the past half-century, but his greatest success has been the promotion of his own celebrity.

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