Drag Him Off the Stage

As Jews and patriotic Americans, we've had enough of Henry Kissinger. American public officials should no longer recognize, let alone honor, him.
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Weeks ago, he sat next to the President of the United States as if he'd been cleansed of his sins, the blood from his hands wiped away. In September he was on stage with the Secretary of State to pontificate about a war he had mismanaged for six of our nation's most difficult years, until his mistakes culminated in the inevitable American defeat.

A sanitized version of Henry Kissinger again haunts the corridors of power. But his failure follows him like a dark shadow. In Vietnam, his murderously intense bombing campaign killed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant civilians. In Laos, he helped destroy an ancient and peaceful civilization. And in Cambodia, he was complicit in Nixon's illegal invasion and savage bombing which eventually provoked the Khmer Rouge terror. Reviled by thousands, labeled a war criminal across the globe, we now learn in recently released tapes from the Nixon White House, that he was more deeply flawed than even his harshest critics had realized.

On March 1, 1973, Nixon and Kissinger received Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, in the White House and listened graciously as she requested their help in pressuring the Soviet Union to allow more Jews to emigrate. Once she was out the door, they belittled her.

Kissinger is heard on the tapes saying, "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

This loathsome comment from a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany as a child, escaping the gas chambers in which so many of his brethren perished. His gross insensitivity, along with the intensity of his desire to ingratiate himself with his anti-Semitic boss, expose a cravenly ambitious bureaucrat devoid of core values. America's foreign policy under his leadership was just as craven. Famously in need of portraying himself as a tough guy, a practitioner of realpolitik, he became instead a founding architect of America's evaporating world leadership.

In Indochina, his policies cost us 58,000 dead Americans, 150,000 more injured or maimed, and a vast fortune. The Vietnamese lost almost two million. Yet today, after the three Indochinese nations successfully pushed us off their land by military force, we now all enjoy good relations as trading partners. Obviously, a smarter foreign policy would have had the same result minus the staggering losses.

But a decade after this catastrophe, President Reagan appointed Kissinger chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America charged with designing an American strategy for the region. The result? Our policies led to the deaths of thousands more, yet failed to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador.

That should have been enough to push Kissinger off his perch as a presidential advisor. But it wasn't. Every president since Reagan has honored him or consulted him or appointed him or hidden behind his presumed prestige.

President Obama recently dragged him out to support the extension of the START Treaty with Russia. The perils of using him in this way are illustrated by Kissinger's negative comments when the treaty was first proposed during the Reagan administration. Then he told Secretary of State George Schultz that the START Treaty "undoes forty years of NATO" (see, James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War). In public, he compared the Reagan administration to anti-nuclear activists. In Newsweek he wrote, "Many Europeans are convinced a gap is being created that in time will enable the Soviet Union to threaten Europe while sparing the United States." That a man who previously held such opinions now endorses a treaty he once condemned can only be an embarrassment to those who use him for support.

Yes, Kissinger is 87 and his failures are long past. But the world honors no statute of limitations for such actions. At the age of 90, the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was indicted for the assassinations, disappearances and human rights violations he committed while in power, including the murder of President Salvador Allende, whose government he seized in 1973.

Oh, did we mention that as Secretary of State, Kissinger sanctioned the coup-plotters, helped justify Allende's murder, and then gave enthusiastic American support to Pinochet's regime? (see Christopher Hitchins, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.)

As Jews and patriotic Americans, we've had enough of Henry Kissinger. American public officials should no longer recognize, let alone honor, him. His appearance at the side of the President demeans the office and the person in it, because once again the Nixon tapes have revealed the rank immorality with which Henry Kissinger contaminated our foreign policy.

We Americans have tragically short memories and suffer the effects of historical amnesia. But the Obama administration trotting out Henry Kissinger is too much to bear. It's as if some future president appointed a paroled Bernie Madoff to advise the Secretary of the Treasury.

The authors are principals in the Democratic political consulting firm, Zimmerman & Markman, based in Santa Monica. Zimmerman's Troublemaker: A Memoir From the Front Lines of the Sixties will be released by Doubleday in April.

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