Overview: I’m currently reading five books. Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete. While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule. As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly. (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.) The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more.
As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise the bar” with the Driftless Area Review’s content.
The Book: The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong
The Challenge: Woodward and Armstrong’s book chronicles the Burger Supreme Court from 1969 to 1975. The Supreme Court decided on many significant cases, including the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, and others. Reading The Brethren has inspired me to write a multibook, deep-reading-style review, focusing on the Supreme Court. For this review, I will also read The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman.
As a historian, the review will pose a great challenge. The nice thing about the three titles is how each reflects off each other. The Brethren follows the decisions of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two long-lasting Justices and FDR appointments. Black died in 1971, paving the way for President Nixon to nominate and appoint William Rehnquist. The Nine examines the Court during the Dubya Years, including the consequences of Rehnquist’s death, Rehnquist having then been elevated from Justice to Chief Justice. The three books reveal the slow movement from a liberal to a conservative agenda. The differing genres will be interesting to evaluate, since Brethren and Nine are works of investigative journalism and Scorpions is popular history. It should prove to be an interesting project.
The Book: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, by Karl Marx
The Challenge: Currently back-burnered for more compelling books. Unfortunately, some sequels are worse than the originals. Unlike Marx’s first volume, Volume 2 is a slow, tedious, bone-dry work, more akin to an economics textbook. In addition, Friedrich Engels edited the present volume following Marx’s death. The work exists as an amalgamation of several of Marx’s notebooks. While the work presents relevant material on the operations of political economy, it is almost too dull to read. The challenge will involve trying to read it without falling asleep.
A further challenge involves me writing more essays in my series Essays on Capital. I want to continue this series, since the first volume presented a rich seam to mine.
The Book: Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp
The Challenge: Douglas Skopp’s self-published novel is a revelation, a well-written exploration of two doctor’s lives in Nazi Germany. I will review the novel on its own, but it will become part of a larger project. This project involves reading three massive, controversial novels about the Third Reich. Two specifically focus on the Eastern Front: Europe Central, by William Vollmann, and The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell. The third novel – The Tunnel, by William Gass – is technically a “university novel,” but the subject matter associated with the protagonist feeds into the works of Vollmann, Littell, and Skopp.
The final challenge will be psychological, since these four novels survey the darkest aspects of modern history.
The Book: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama
The Challenge: This is the second history by Simon Schama that I’ve read. I previously read Rembrandt’s Eyes, his magisterial double biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt von Rijk. As with Rembrandt’s Eyes, Citizens is an epic account, mixing biography, pop culture history, visual culture, politics, foreign policy, and tax law into a compelling page-turner.
French history is a particular enthusiasm of mine. The challenge will be tempering this enthusiasm with the disinterested eye of a historian and bringing to bear my previous knowledge in French literature, historiography, and pop culture.
Blog Feature Revival
This year will see the revival of blog features on long hiatus. The first will be the return of The Art of Reviewing. French theorist Roland Barthes and prolific Gnostic Bardolator Harold Bloom are the first two on the docket.
The limited series 5000 Pages of Kissinger will conclude with my review of Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s final volume of his memoirs. I have the skeleton of a review in place that I wrote several months ago. The Arab Spring of 2011 and the nascent Occupy movement have made it a challenge to contextualize Kissinger’s work without seeming immediately outdated. Both Arab Spring and Occupy have overturned the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm of supporting US-friendly free market dictatorships and absolutist monarchies in the Middle East. These movements, along with the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s Small Government Neo-Isolationism, present opportunities for the government that acts in our name (if you’re a US reader of this blog) to reassess its global strategy, foreign policy interests, and free market cheerleading.
For decades, the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm had operated as a given within the global foreign policy architecture. That given is no longer true and no longer equipped to deal with the Middle Eastern calls for freedom and the end of economic inequality. As of this writing, the Arab Spring has become the symbol for freedom and liberation from oppression. The end-result of these protests and coups is still unwritten.
While I would like to this blog a major part of my life, creative projects and personal obligations inevitably get in the way. These include a random assortment of personal and professional business.
I am getting married in early October and planning a wedding is a time-consuming endeavor.
On the reviewing front, I have a small pile of books from the Permanent Press I want to get around to reading. I also have a couple novels from Archipelago Books I want to read and review.
My job is second shift and a temporary assignment. Like many, many others who have been displaced, abandoned, or simply eliminated from the free market economy, I have a very real and very pressing goal of achieving full-time employment. (The kind of employment associated with health benefits and paid time off.) Working second shift has made it more challenging to post reviews, but with any challenge, it can be overcome. On that note, if any blog readers like what they see and want to hire me as a writer, I’m all ears. My contact information is in the Submitting Materials section.
Finally, I am working on the last round of revisions for a science fiction thriller. I am planning to resubmit it to a small publisher who showed interest in the work. In my query letter, I described my story as “The Sopranos meet Dune.” I’m making this creative project a priority, since I am nearly finished with the revisions. Overall, I have been pleased, since the revisions have strengthened the novel.
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth.
“Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
Years of Upheaval, the second volume of memoirs by Henry Kissinger, continues his personal account of public service, spanning the time of Nixon’s re-election to Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. The memoirs record a short span of time although it encompasses a plethora of geopolitical, domestic, and personal events. In the words of Homer Simpson, this volume has it all, “the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.”
Riding on the triumph of the Paris Agreement, the document that began the peace process in Vietnam, Kissinger returned home to the United States. In a few short months, he witnessed President Nixon win the 1972 Presidential Election in a record landslide victory. The afterglow of re-election victory began to fade when papers began reporting about a burglary in the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The office was in the Watergate building. The imperious tough guy edifice of Richard Nixon, personifying the dam that held back the onslaught of international Communism, had a hairline crack in it. If Nixon could re-imagine Cold War foreign policy, with the help of Kissinger, his National Security advisor, surely this third-rate burglary needn’t worry a President who opened China, ended the Vietnam War securing “peace with honor,” and defused the menace of nuclear annihilation with détente.
Years of Upheaval chronicles Kissinger’s ascension to the post of Secretary of State, negotiating with the various parties in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur, and dealing with the challenges of foreign policy while executive power eroded in the prolonged hydra of scandals called Watergate.
Inside/Outside
The State Department: Now with 30% more ominousness.
Presidents privileged enough to have a second term usually reshuffle their staff. In this case, Nixon dismissed William Rogers and nominated Henry Kissinger for Secretary of State. Following his confirmation, Kissinger assumed the dual role of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. President Ford later terminated Kissinger’s special situation, preserving Kissinger in the Cabinet position and letting Brent Scowcroft take over the role as National Security Advisor.
The recent maelstrom of current events, from the resurrection of the Far Right to the Wikileaks fiasco, makes this an invaluable book. A major component of its value it is specific bias. One usually associates bias with a lack of worth and this makes it easy to dismiss works that may merit reconsideration. This behavior happens all too often in our hyperventilating political culture with its calls for “fair and balanced” reporting, not listening to critics, and hating everything that falls outside our tunnel vision.
After one recognizes the bias of a work like this, one should work towards divining the grain of the bias. Because Kissinger specialized in foreign policy, it afforded him a unique position to witness the spreading Watergate fiasco. It also allowed him a means of justifying a way out of getting swept up in the scandal, containing the damage to “juvenile and illegal” activities perpetrated by campaign workers and those staffers associated with domestic policy. This memoir is self-serving in an entirely different fashion than the Haldemann Diaries or Chuck Colson’s Born Again.
The perspective is also unique in that the Secretary of State receives the resignation letter of the President. While Kissinger engaged in shuttle diplomacy, the executive branch suffered from multiple disruptions. Watergate began as the Vice Presidency became threatened by Spiro Agnew’s monetary shenanigans. The verbal warhammer of the Nixon Regime, Agnew uttered some of the greatest one-liners, usually penned by that paragon of tolerance, Pat Buchanan. Raging against the nattering nabobs of negativity and the impudent snobs, Nixon’s heir apparent left amidst accusations of bribery and fraud. The Silent Majority hadn’t yet metastasized into the Moral Majority. In another unique instance in this paranoid time, the circumstances gave Nixon the opportunity to nominate his own successor.
From an institutional standpoint, Upheaval offers a firsthand look at Kissinger’s transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State. The former is an advisory position with no confirmation necessary and an office within the White House. The latter involves Senate confirmation and is the most prestigious Cabinet position, heading the Foreign Service, and occupying a massive bureaucracy from Foggy Bottom (the Harry S Truman Building). The prestige and responsibility of the Secretary of State is further enhanced by Kissinger’s status as a foreign-born immigrant. (During World War 2, Kissinger worked in Army Intelligence, returning to Germany a decade after fleeing in the Thirties.) At the height of the Watergate scandal and the dissolution of executive authority, Kissinger acted as a “surrogate President for foreign policy.” Once Ford became President, Kissinger fell back into a more traditional capacity.
A Shalom and a Salaam
The Americans & Russians are sending bombing planes tanks
Chinese Egyptians Syrians help me battle for my righteous
house my Soul’s dirt Spirit’s Nation’s body’s
boundaries & Self’s territory my
Zionist homeland my Palestinian inheritance
The Capitalist Communist & Third World Peoples’
Republics Dictatorships Police States Socialisms & Democracies
are all sending Deadly Weapons to our aid!
“Jaweh and Allah Battle,” Allen Ginsberg, 1974.
White House Years provided a glimpse into the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement and the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War. It was the foreign policy showpiece of the first volume. In Years of Upheaval, the Yom Kippur War is given the same showpiece status. Southeast Asia faded into the background only to have the Middle East flare up with Egypt and Syria attacking Israel. Kissinger took the lead in the disengagement negotiations with the dual aims of bringing about a coherent peace process and locking out the Soviet Union from exacerbating radicalism in the region. Existing as a geopolitical archaeology of sorts, one witnesses how the United States came to treat the grab bag of absolute monarchies and dictatorships as our allies. Like a sequel to World War 2 with the Soviet Union and United States exploiting “our Germans” versus “their Germans,” the despots and tyrants became “our Arabs” to combat the threat of Soviet expansionism, manifest in the loaded yet vague term “Arab radicalism.”
Despite the cynicism, hatred, and despair one feels towards this region and its seemingly unending conflicts, Kissinger’s account reveals the specific context that resulted in the resulting military and diplomatic actions.
In the early Seventies, the Middle East lay dormant with Israel sitting precariously atop conquered territories wrested from Arab hands in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Arab nations, specifically Egypt and Syria, festered with resentment and impotence. The recent assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser created a power vacuum Anwar el-Sadat filled. The United States did not consider Sadat a real threat or a leader of promise until the Yom Kippur War. According to Kissinger, Sadat did not send Egypt into war against Israel for conquest, but to prove that Egypt was not impotent against Israeli arms.
Herein lays the paradox facing any peace process in the Middle East. Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, maintains occupied territories of its three neighbors, as a means of maintaining security. Egypt and Syria have portions of their territory occupied by Israel. In order to assuage “the Arab street” – a euphemism for the sociopaths and maniacs who cloak a bloodthirsty ethos in “fundamentalist Islam” – and the more established oligarchies (usually military), leaders have to walk a fine line between appeasing the base and making sensible decisions. It is a delicate dance that can have fatal consequences for all involved.
Jordan is a special case. The West Bank, prior to Israel’s occupation, belonged to Jordan. Jordan, throughout this prolonged crisis, remained a stalwart ally of the United States. It did not press as hard as Egypt or as passionately as Syria, because it had to hold off the designs of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat. The rocky land and the half of Jerusalem dubbed “Palestine” belonged to Jordan. Kissinger, trying to keep this precarious situation as simple as possible, worked with King Hussein to block any unwarranted influence from the PLO during the peace negotiations.
In addition to this complicated set of challenges, the Middle East is a region that has several thousand years of political history and long-simmering blood feuds. The region came into existence following the arbitrary set of lines and arbitrary set of leaders concocted at the Versailles Treaty following World War 1. One can dig deeper and find Arab occupations, Turkish occupations, Crusader occupations, and on and on. Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt hearkens back to the Book of Exodus and big-haired Charlton Heston movies. Now it is Anwar Sadat saying, “Let my people go!” Instead of Hebrew slaves, it is an Egyptian Army surrounded on all sides by the Israeli Army, without supplies.
Prior to negotiations, Kissinger recounts the delicate task of supplying Israel. The airlift operation comes across like a transcontinental Rube Goldberg Machine, endlessly complicated by wary European nations, Soviet saber rattling, and a nation rapidly spinning into a frenzy over Watergate.
Charting this dangerous course ends with the historic Kilometer 101 meeting. In a tent in the middle of the desert, military negotiators from both sides begin the arduous task of actually taking to each other. The faint glimmer of hope presides when leaders from the belligerent nations meet in Geneva. Drawn together by the prospect of giving the region a lasting peace, one understands the motivation since the Middle East had been in perpetual warfare since 1949. Kissinger labored extensively with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel to detach political issues from disengagement. As per usual with Kissinger, it involved the creation of a bogus-sounding organization under whose auspices the disengagement would take place. Kissinger did the same thing with the North Vietnamese when they pressured the United States to create a coalition government with representatives from the Communist Party.
The challenges to begin a Middle East peace process had become further exacerbated by the unraveling of executive authority due to Watergate. Under normal circumstances, the Secretary of State could use the tried-and-true tactic of carrot and stick. With Watergate eroding Nixon’s authority, Kissinger had less authority to cajole or threaten the leaders, even those like Sadat who actively sought an American alliance.
The Middle East represents a Gordian knot of paradox, atrocity, and war. Kissinger gives a succinct analysis of the history, diplomatic challenges, and personalities involved in the region. In that case, it is useful for anyone seeking to understand a complicated situation and its history that spans millennia.
The Valley of Bones
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
Ezekiel 37: 1 – 3
The memoirs of a government official in the upper echelons make it easy to forget what a high-stakes game diplomacy can be. Buried beneath mountainous prose that describes numerous meetings between dignitaries drenched in minutiae and bonhomie, the reader can become overwhelmed or bored. Middle East leaders, Arab and Israeli, that worked towards creating a working peace occasionally found themselves in the valley of bones.
Anwar Sadat met the fate of his predecessor in 1981 following his historic meeting with Israel. This ushered in the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. King Faisal, another personality in this volume, met his end with assassination in 1975. Yitzhak Rabin, who played a role in Golda Meir’s government, died at the hands of an Israeli religious fanatic in 1995. One laments that the yearning for peace often gets destroyed by the faith-based initiative of bloodthirsty fanatics, or, in Kissinger’s witty phrase, “apostles of the ordinary.”
Sadat’s martyrdom occurred shortly before Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982. Israel still occupies the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (1967 to present). The growing influence of the Palestinian cause has complicated the peace process.
Besides the deaths of Middle Eastern leaders, the United States endured the impeachment crisis shortly after Vice President Agnew resigned. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, Kissinger remains standing.
Strange Interludes
Interviewer (Eric): From the plastic arts we turn to football. Last night in the Stadium of Light, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football. Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catennachio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino. Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism and outstanding in the fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield cognoscento, Jimmy Buzzard.
Buzzard (John): Good evening Brian.
“The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes to the Bathroom” (1.11), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Literary Football,” airdate December 28, 1969.
The inordinate length of this book allows for the occurrence of some strange interludes. One encounters situations from the menacing to the ridiculous. Because Kissinger is an Ivy League academic and a career diplomat, his writing comes across as lapidary, overdetermined, and always polite. He finds a way to say kind words about nearly everyone he meets, friend and foe alike. His description and justification of Nixon’s anti-Semitism or King Faisal’s anti-Zionism are marvels in grammatical acrobatics.
Following the afterglow of Nixon’s re-election, Kissinger is whisked to Hanoa, capital of North Vietnam, to hammer out the remaining minutiae in the Paris Accords. It is one of the strangest trips in American diplomatic history. Hanoi comes across like a small provincial town rather than a towering fortress, the monolith acting as bulwark against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The battle-scarred landscape and the empty streets say more about the agonies of the Vietnam War than any writer does. The entire experience has a strange otherworldly feeling, with Kissinger negotiating with Le Duc Tho and others in a building only a few blocks from the notorious Hanoi Hilton.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, during one of Kissinger’s many trips to Israel, he had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the museum and memorial to the Holocaust located in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In an uncharacteristic act of silence, Kissinger says nothing about the experience. Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no more poetry after Auschwitz.” Given the monumental scope and horror of the Holocaust, it would seem trite or futile to attempt to write about it. The silence seems out of character with Kissinger’s gregarious nature and his penchant for cheerleading for American ideals and power.
The geopolitical context further complicates this visit, since Israel’s military conquests bring to mind associations of Germany’s quest for Lebensraum (“living space”). Additionally, Kissinger’s repeated endorsements of America’s quest for freedom and liberty come across as vacant gestures when openly courting the support of the brutal regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The United States, in decades to come, will tie itself into an incomprehensible knot of alliances with both Israel and the Middle Eastern tyrannies. During Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”, many of the pro-Soviet Arab tyrannies eventually tilted to become pro-US Arab tyrannies. (Or in the words of our youth, “frenemies.”)
Kissinger describes King Faisal’s position thus:
The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Western visitors, was clearly deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the Kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim on protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, armed by the Soviet Union). The virulent opposition to Zionism reassured radicals and the PLO and thus reduced the incentive to follow any temptation to undermine the monarchy domestically. And its thrust was vague enough to imply no precise consequences; it dictated few policy options save a general anti-Communism.
During that meeting between Kissinger and King Faisal, the King asserts that Israel was the result of a plot between Jews and Communists, “put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.” This kind of rhetoric may sound odd to Western ears in the mid-Seventies, with the rise of the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck’s popularity, not so much.
The travels of Kissinger become accidentally hilarious when he describes a football (i.e. soccer) game he attended in Munich. It was the final game of the World Cup. He attended with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new Foreign Minister for West Germany. He describes the strategies of the soccer teams in foreign policy terms. While Kissinger does pepper his memoirs with the occasional joke or two, (at least one suspects those are jokes, since they are usually devoid of any humorous content). Germany “used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd.” “The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail.” (Oh, snap!) “England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament.” Has anyone contacted Kissinger to provide color commentary for World Cup tournaments? Then again, if Kissinger provided commentary in a Madden-like video game for soccer, young kids everywhere might put down their Funyuns and Mountain Dew to actually go outside.
My Country for a Horse
“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Richard Nixon, The Nixon Interviews with David Frost, airdate May 19, 1977
“L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the State”)
King Louis XIV of France, attributed.
Watergate remains the other grand narrative in Years of Upheaval. It haunts his journeys like a grim specter. With executive authority rapidly evaporating, his power to negotiate became diminished. As per usual with political memoirs, he places a lot of blame on “professional Nixon-haters” and “McGovernite peaceniks,” while giving short shrift to the actual disturbing implications a scandal of this sort presents to the very fabric of participatory democracy. In the simplified folklore that passes for historical knowledge, Watergate remains the “Mother of All Scandals” both in terms of actual malfeasance and it is closer in living memory. Unlike the XYZ Affair and the Teapot Dome scandals, our parents and grandparents remember (or mis-remember) what happened. Watergate also put a close to a disastrous decade in foreign and domestic policy. The Vietnam War took down three presidencies, one by assassination (Kennedy), one a single-term catastrophe (Johnson), and one by impeachment (Nixon).
While it is easy to turn this is a partisan affair, Democrats gloating over Republican misbehavior and the ruthless Nixon finally being put down like a rabid dog, Watergate represents something more malevolent and disturbing than just electoral shenanigans. Despite the nature of the cause, placed under the umbrella of “national security,” Watergate destroyed the moral credibility of the Presidency. The enemy lists, the bugging, COINTELPRO, and using intelligence agencies to cover-up an investigation all reeked of political tyranny. This was behavior fitting for Pinochet, but not for a leader of a democracy. “The center will not hold,” to William Butler Yeats. Watergate was one step too far.
Unfortunately, the creeping forces of authoritarianism never quite held, since Nixon never went to trial. President Ford, in one of his first acts, preemptively pardoned Nixon. The ensuing impeachment trial would have grievously wounded an already divided nation, but the pardon created a dangerous precedent. It gave the President an aura of invincibility. Do whatever crimes and atrocities are necessary to secure your power and have your successor pardon you. Something no Jacobean dramatist could have dreamt up.
Legacies and Their Discontents
Senator Pat Geary: I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.
Michael Corleone: We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family.
The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
From Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
When the Nixon administration went supernova and collapsed in on itself like a dying star, the United States preserved his legacy in its foreign policy. Despite the scandal and humiliation of resignation, the world is still cast in terms of Nixon’s radical realignment. The push towards opening China is one of the reasons the Communist regime still exists. The Middle East remains allied with the United States, the tyrannies contending with the oppressed masses and the occasional terrorist flare-up that might damage tourism and military aid shipments.
Nixon’s foreign policy legacy should be seen by the successor administrations less as a prison (what it is now) than as a strategic innovation (what it could be). A border clash between the Soviet Union and China created the impetus to play the Communist giants off each other, making it possible for the US to extricate itself from the Vietnam conflict. Can the same be done with the tyrannical monarchy of Saudi Arabia, our nominal ally, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a faux democracy? Nixon provided the necessary strategy with détente and linkage, defusing the confrontations of the Cold War, and leading it towards the inevitable endgame. With the Cold War finished, the legacy is the free market on a truly global scale, but the practical alliances created against the Soviets has created a rogues gallery of tyrants, dictators, and absolute monarchs who pay fealty to the United States. Is it time, now that markets are free, to work towards making people just as free? Maybe the politicians, only caring about their re-election and personal enrichment, see cheap commodities as a greater priority than individual liberty?
Another legacy of the Nixon administration is in popular culture. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine postmodern kaleidoscope of paranoia, perversion, and war atrocities, was published in 1973. In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola released the Godfather: Part II, a film that was both sequel and prequel to the Godfather. The second film charts the immigrant beginnings of the Corleone Family. Vito Corleone rises to power, while the film charts the Corleone Family in the Fifties and Sixties. Michael Corleone, heir of Vito, has power, wealth, and influence. Senators do his bidding and power is extended from New York to Nevada and into Cuba. Castro’s Revolution cuts short the Mafia plutocracy. Michael retreats to his eyrie in Lake Tahoe, consolidating power again in another periodic Mafia purge, whacking the disloyal. But the power corrupts him, rotting him from the inside, when he puts a hit out on his brother, Fredo. The Godfather: Part II is an American fable about immigration and the corruptions of capitalism. It also works as a metaphor of the Nixon Presidency with its paranoia, seclusion, and ruthlessness.
Political memoirs are works of self-justification. In the case of Henry Kissinger, he packages these self-justifications in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years (1979). As a major partner with President Richard Nixon, Kissinger, working as the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (more commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor), he followed Nixon’s wishes to direct the nation’s foreign policy from the White House. Kissinger transformed himself from a Harvard academic to a diplomat engineering international relationships (political and military) of world-historical importance.
During this period, Nixon and Kissinger could claim credit for two major foreign policy achievements: the “opening” of China and the “end” of the Vietnam War. White House Years covers these and many more events, spanning from January 1969 to January 1974.
President Dwight Eisenhower established the position of National Security Advisor in the frigid year of 1953. The creation of this position reflects the spirit of the times, much like the creation of the Department of Homeland Security amidst the rubble of the World Trade Center and the smoldering wing of the Pentagon. Unlike the Secretary of State and similar Cabinet positions, Congress does not confirm the National Security Advisor. Freed from the bureaucratic entanglements associated with State and Defense, the National Security Advisor can, at least in theory, offer the President disinterested counsel and objective analysis on whatever specific crises threaten the nation’s foreign policy. During his tenure as National Security Advisor, Nixon would use Kissinger to circumvent the processes of the State Department, headed at that time by Secretary of State William Rogers. This trend of circumvention and secrecy would later become the undoing of the Nixon Administration. Kissinger in Volume 2 of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, will cover the “third-rate burglary” and the erosion of Executive authority.
Reading White House Years is an endurance test in several ways. First, the sheer weight and length of the tome makes it, to paraphrase the Monty Python sketch on Australian table wines, ideal for hand-to-hand combat. Used with enough force and the book is as lethal as a cast iron skillet to the forehead. The hardcover runs an astonishing 1476 pages. The Penguin edition of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital and the King James Bible are both shorter by several hundred pages. Second, Kissinger’s responsibility and notoriety in relation to numerous foreign policy decisions makes him a polarizing figure. The Left characterizes Kissinger as a war criminal, while the Right characterizes him as “soft on Communism,” due to his working towards détente and dealing with Red China. The latte drinking, New York Times-reading, Prius-driving Blue State elitist liberal and the PBR-swilling, gun toting, flag-waving, multiple-gun-owning, gay-, immigrant-, and feminist-hating Red State “real ‘Murican” can join hands and denounce Kissinger. Finally, the prose style of Kissinger, like an Andy Warhol film, is simultaneously seductive and tediously boring. An strong editor could have lopped off a few hundred pages and still produced an epic of foreign policy and Washington insider gossip. In the words of the National Book Award committee on Gravity’s Rainbow, the work is “turgid, overwritten, and obscene.” Unlike Pynchon’s work, with its masterful amalgamation of genres, mysticism, pornography, and comedic set pieces, White House Years is obscene in its distillation of carpet bombing, amoral diplomatic gamesmanship, and Machiavellian maneuvering into the innocuous bureaucratese that has become the style of countless memoranda.
The reader should be aware of these challenges when reading this monumental work. Kissinger, the loquacious courtier, leads the reader through numerous meetings with foreign leaders and offers thumbnail guides on different styles of foreign policy. The differences between Russian and Chinese negotiation is illuminating. On the other hand, Kissinger obscured and buried points in presentations reminiscent of “idiot briefings.” In other words, giving the victim of the briefing an information overload, albeit information not relevant to the argument. Exhaustion and fury can drive the reader into a numbed state. Kissinger will go into detail bordering on the pointillist over something inconsequential while rushing over major areas of contention. Reading the book was like prolonged combat with someone who will not let you get a word in edgewise. To adapt the graffiti written about Marcel Proust: “Henry Kissinger is a yenta.”
The China Card
In Angels in America: Part Two: Perestroika, Roy Cohn, in a hospital bed dying of AIDS says to Joe Pitt, his young protégé, “If you want the smoke and puffery you can listen to Kissinger and Schultz and those guys, but if you want to look at the heart of modern conservatism, you look at me. Everyone has abandoned the struggle, everything nowadays is just sipping tea with Nixon and Mao. That was disgusting, did you see that? Were you born yet?” When Nixon had tea with Mao and remarked, “I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall,” Cold War foreign policy forever changed.
One of the foreign policy strategies Kissinger repeats again and again is the policy of linkage. In theory, the strategy is reminiscent of the quid pro quo. Strategy is linked with substance. When Nixon entered office in January 1969, the United States did not recognize the People’s Republic of China; never had a summit with the Soviet Union; and the Vietnam War had cost the nation blood, treasure, and unity. Amidst these foreign policy challenges, Nixon pledged to end the war in Vietnam and bring “peace with honor.”
In 1969, a foreign policy opportunity presented itself. Along the extensive Soviet-Chinese border, military clashes took place. Kissinger saw this as an opportunity to play the Communist giants off each other. It was a daring move that would have consequences for several foreign policy challenges already in motion: the Vietnam War (North Vietnam funded by the Soviet Union), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), West Germany’s Ostpolitik (normalizing borders and treaties with the Eastern Communist bloc), and the Soviet military presence in Egypt (a consequence of the Six-Day War in 1967). Hence, a thousand-plus pages of self-justification, evasion, government jargon, and memoranda excerpts. Whether one thinks of Kissinger as war criminal, elder statesman, or some combination of both depends on the political stripe of the reader.
Once China opened, the United States could use the relationship as a wedge between Communist giants. The gambit represented great risk to the Nixon Administration, especially alienating the Right and jeopardizing his chances for re-election. After a career as a Red-baiter, it must have struck the die-hards of the Right as treasonous and offensive to court China, especially after the carnage wrought by the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the history of the American foreign policy must conceded that ideological differences take a back seat to the amoral engine of self-interest. China astutely recognized the needs of the United States and integrated into their own specific foreign policy requirements. Today the United States lives with the consequences of opening China, for good or ill. One only needs to look where most of their products are made and thank Kissinger for his contributions.
Fascists and Despots; Communists and Tyrants
In White House Years, the reader encounters numerous foreign dignitaries, powerful leaders, and charismatic individuals via Kissinger’s many meetings at home and abroad. Most meetings come off as procedural and drab; conversations focusing on this or that technical detail. Kissinger encounters Fascists, despots, Communists, and tyrants. Depending on the situation, the aforementioned human rights violators may be either friend or foe. During the Cold War an ally’s human rights record or violations of democracy became forgotten in the global chess game. This explains the United States rich history of friendship with Iran and Spain and antipathy towards Cuba and China.
Following the China summit, Nixon and Kissinger met the Shah of Iran. While Kissinger lavishes praise on Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, he comes across like a cross between Tsar Nicholas II and Little Lord Fauntleroy. A man of gentle nature and buffeted by the great events surrounding him, he was greatly dependent on American military and economic aid. Unfortunately, Shah Pahlavi’s over-dependence on foreign largesse made him a weak ruler. A pawn in a blockade containing Soviet expansionism, when the Iranian people overthrew his tyrannical rule, the United States broke off relations while the nascent democracy slid into the muck of theocracy and extremism. The taking of American hostages did not help the situation, but it brought up a dangerous question: Why are nations that instigate regime change on their own vilified while nations overly dependent on American aid transform into weak governments? National self-determination is in the best interests of the United States, except when it is not.
During another world tour, Kissinger meets Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Franco and his Fascist cadres won the Spanish Civil War in the Thirties with the military aid of Nazi Germany. In the Seventies, Franco remained a political relic, a sclerotic dictator, albeit a useful one in the goal of a global anti-communist crusade. Ironically, East Germany called the Berlin Wall the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.
“In the Seventies, many reacting by rote found it hard to admit that Spain was far less repressive than any Communist state and than most of the new nations.” By that reasoning, Kissinger would not have had any problem with a National Socialist Germany, since the Germans were less repressive, numerically, than the USSR. Only a few paragraphs on Kissinger will take credit for assisting in Spain’s tradition to a democracy. Yet the bad taste remains, an American conservative rubbing elbows with an aged Fascist.
One witnesses authoritarianism from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Amidst the meandering relationships and linkages created by Kissinger’s diplomacy, one eventually becomes immune to the sight of blood on the hands of both parties. Granted, one can compare the numbers with Franco’s autocratic regime and the USSR’s, but it also desecrates the scores murdered by both regimes.
REMF Blues
The opening of China created opportunities for extricating the United States military forces from South Vietnam. The plan, buttressed by the détente between the United States, Soviet Union, and Red China, isolated North Vietnam. Negotiations, after years of stalemate, could finally present a real substantive result. With other foreign policy decisions, this one also came with difficult choices and atrocious consequences.
Suffice to say the Vietnam War was an epic conflict. Vietnam had endured centuries of rule by various occupiers, most notably China and France. It shook off China’s shackles, enduring nearly one thousand years of occupation. Following the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French left after one hundred years of colonial rule. (The French left Vietnam to fight another colonial war in Algeria, trading humid jungles for arid deserts.) The situation stalemated in the 1950s under the rule of nepotistic sociopath President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and charismatic elder statesman Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. Diem’s misrule ended in 1963 in a bloody coup sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency. (Another Catholic President’s rule also ended in assassination in November of the same year.)
Nixon inherited the Vietnam War from the previous administration and it was his promise to end the war that got him elected. One of the pillars of Nixon’s foreign policy was called “Vietnamization.” After a decade of American escalation coupled with military and economic support, Nixon made the tough decision to extricate the ground troops. In order to do so, the North Vietnamese sanctuaries had to be hit. North Vietnam, violating the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia, used those nations to infiltrate the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trial. By 1969, following Nixon’s election, all sides had blood on their hands. North Vietnam, while justified in its struggle against foreign occupation, violated the neutrality of other nations and behaved like any other Communist tyranny. While less genocidal than the Khmer Rouge, this is only a Leftist parroting of Kissinger’s adulation of Franco’s moderate Fascism. The United States also faced a credibility gap when it claimed to fight for freedom and human rights while the dead of My Lai and other atrocities still lay fresh for the world to see. South Vietnam was a weak regime, nominally democratic, constantly embattled and slouching towards military dictatorship.
Kissinger’s goal in his negotiations with the North Vietnamese was to create a situation where both Vietnams could co-exist. The precedents of North and South Korea and East and West Germany stood as reminders that co-existence could become a possibility. The situation became complicated when Congress and public support for a military presence dwindled. Without a troop presence in South Vietnam, Nixon substituted an accelerated air war while the troop withdrawals continued. Kissinger, from his office in the White House, embodied the Cold War technocrat, no different from Vietnam architects Robert MacNamara and General William Westmoreland, staring at situation reports and system analyses. For all his ragging on the bureaucracy, he retains a bureaucratic practice, legitimizing government policies via mountains of paperwork. Through these reports and memoranda, he comes to his idea of the truth. The limbless in Laos and Cambodia also speak another kind of truth and not all of it emanates from Communist oppression. While done with the best of intentions, Nixon and Kissinger paved Southeast Asia with unexploded bombs and mines.
The Calm Before the Storm
White House Years ends in domestic tragedy. After years of diligent effort and complex maneuvering, the United States appears on the verge of ending its involvement in Vietnam. “Peace with honor” is so close to being achieved it is palpable. In the house of Ferdinand Léger, French abstract artist and Communist, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart, finally agree on terms to end the War. The first volume of memoirs ends with the double victory of successful negotiations and Nixon’s re-election to the Presidency.
Nevertheless, there was something rotten on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In the end, the Nixon Administration was undone by the very crimes laid upon the North Vietnamese: illegality and dirty tricks, the monomaniacal desire to win at any cost, and a zealous fanaticism. In a word: Watergate.
