A new Henry Kissinger documentary gilds the stinkweed

If you’d rather not know the worst thing Henry Kissinger ever did to America, then “American Experience: Kissinger” is the documentary for you.

A Rip Van Winkle who slept through the last half-century and awoke on Monday, Oct. 27, to find himself watching public television might think we learned little while he was out growing a sumptuous floor-length beard. “Kissinger” gives us President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state pretty much as I remember him from my childhood TV viewing. Having entered the kindergarten the year Nixon and Kissinger entered the White House, I remember classmates thrilling to their foreign policy adventures: The undeniable fun of ping-pong diplomacy, the excitement of the opening to Communist China, the welcome announcement of a nuclear arms “limitation” agreement with Russia, the extravagant televised election-year summits in Beijing and Moscow.

When Kissinger announced just weeks before the 1972 presidential election that “we believe peace is at hand” in Vietnam, I absorbed my parents’ relief that the United States was finally getting out of that war, along with their skepticism that the deal would actually work. “Kissinger” revisits these glories more or less as America saw them at the time, replaying many of the same TV news clips, augmented by talking heads whose behind-the-scenes anecdotes were, by and large, pretty hoary by the end of the last century.

In other words, “Kissinger” is more recap than reveal. It repeats, without shedding new light, on the ways Kissinger has long been celebrated and castigated. Defenders say he did great things for American foreign policy, critics say he did terrible things to other countries and neither pay much attention to the terrible things he did to America. This reflects into the Faustian pact implicit in Kissinger’s brand of foreign policy realism — realpolitik in the original German — with its empty promise that if we treat other countries badly, America will benefit. The promise remains dazzling and deliciously diabolical enough for adherents to forget that deals with the devil always come with a hidden, inescapable price tag.

“Kissinger” teases viewers with an animated credit sequence prominently featuring a tape recorder. If they expect revelations from the best source of information about Kissinger’s time in power, Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, they’ll be disappointed. More than an hour passes before “Kissinger” plays a Nixon tape, and then it’s a trivial comment about Kissinger’s social life by presidential secretary Rose Mary Woods. “Kissinger” does feature some dramatic readings of transcripts Kissinger’s secretaries made from tapes of his phone calls, but they’re far less revealing.

As someone who has spent 25 years with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center researching the White House tapes of Nixon and other presidents, I see “Kissinger” as a missed opportunity. A great documentary could be made out of the evidence this one omits.

“Kissinger” lets its subject describe his motives in the loftiest terms: “Ending the Vietnam War had been a principal goal of Nixon’s first term, not only in order to bring peace, but in order to end our domestic divisions. And I wanted to create conditions which would unify the country again by having an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” The Nixon tapes reveal what mattered to Kissinger more than peace, unity and the healing of domestic division — namely his career. That’s why he counseled Nixon to secretly time American military withdrawal from Vietnam to the 1972 presidential election.

Publicly, they claimed they had to add four years to the war because it took that long for Vietnamization to work. But they knew it wouldn’t. One of the first things Kissinger did as national security adviser on Jan. 21, 1969, was ask military, diplomatic and intelligence officials how soon the South Vietnamese army could be trained and equipped to defend their government without American troops. Their answer was unanimous: Never.

In a document that remained classified too long, the National Security Council staff reported on March 22, 1969, that “all agencies agree” that South Vietnam could not, “either now or even when fully modernized,” withstand the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong “without U.S. combat support in the form of air, helicopters, artillery, logistics and major ground forces.” When Nixon told America that Vietnamization would strengthen the South Vietnamese “so that they could defend themselves when we left,” he was lying.

Drawing out American withdrawal from Vietnam did more than prevent the pre-election collapse of Saigon, Nixon’s shot at a second term and Kissinger’s chance to become secretary of state. It also gave them a chance to declare Vietnamization a success before Election Day 1972, repackaging a policy of slow retreat and disguised defeat as if it were a triumph of strong, patient, steadfast leadership.

Their fraud inflicted unfathomable harm on the people they swore to serve. The death toll during the four years they spent postponing the inevitable included at least 20,175 American soldiers. Hundreds of thousands more lost years of their youth. Some suffered through years of cruel captivity in North Vietnamese prisoner camps, since Hanoi refused to release them until Nixon and Kissinger withdrew the last American troops.

To be fair, Nixon did consider making a trade — American withdrawal for American POWs — on March 19, 1971, over a year before the 1972 election. “Henry, I’ve never been much for negotiation, but I think when we finally get down to the nut-cutting, it’s very much to their advantage to have a negotiation to get us the hell out and give us those prisoners,” Nixon said, and “if they’ll make that kind of a deal, we’ll make that any time they’re ready.”

Kissinger appealed to the darker angels of his nature, reminding him that the Communists would conquer South Vietnam after American troops came home. “We can’t have it knocked over — brutally — to put it brutally — before the election,” Kissinger said.

“That’s right,” Nixon said. The POWs’ freedom had to wait till Nixon’s second term.

If you want to hear the most damning tapes and read the transcripts, the University of Virginia Press put them online. I quote more of them in a book, academic journal article and series of homemade videos. (I’m including links to all these tapes because they’re not in “Kissinger.”)

Instead of letting viewers hear a president and national security adviser decide life-or-death matters based on petty political self-interest, “Kissinger” leaves it to one of Kissinger’s former aides to summarize the evidence this way: “If you read some of the tapes, there’s one place where Nixon and Kissinger are talking and Kissinger says to Nixon, ‘Well, Mr. President, if Saigon collapses before the election, you really have a problem. But if it collapses afterwards, it doesn’t really matter.’”

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Why settle for a vague secondhand summary when the tapes themselves are readily available?

While “Kissinger” scants the tapes, it leans precariously on one source. I tallied no fewer than 50 sound bites from Niall Ferguson, none of which identified him — at least in the preview version of “Kissinger” made available to the press — as the man Kissinger handpicked to be his authorized biographer. Viewers deserve a warning. If Ferguson was trying to explain Kissinger’s Vietnam exit strategy, he did not succeed; if he was trying to confuse the issue, he did. Ferguson said, “A big question was what exactly Kissinger was playing for. Was he playing for the long-term survival of South Vietnam or was he playing for a decent interval, a respectable amount of time that South Vietnam would survive?… Nixon and Kissinger could sometimes sound as if they were focused on getting through the ’72 election and after that the fate of South Vietnam would really not be their problem.”

Nixon and Kissinger were, of course, concerned with what happened to South Vietnam after the 1972 election. If Saigon fell too soon after they withdrew, it would become all too obvious that they had lost the war, that Vietnamization failed, that they’d sent more than 20,000 American soldiers to their deaths in vain. “Our opponents will say we should’ve done it three years ago,” Kissinger said on Aug. 3, 1972.

“I know,” Nixon said.

“So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which — after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater,” Kissinger said. That “year or two” between Nixon’s final troop withdrawal and the final Communist takeover of South Vietnam was what Kissinger called a “decent interval.” It was a way to make it look like Saigon’s fall was not Nixon and Kissinger’s fault.

“If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn,” Kissinger said.

I bet more than a few PBS viewers still give a damn. They deserve to know how Kissinger and Nixon secretly engineered this face-saving “decent interval.” 

The best evidence of that sordid policy comes from Kissinger’s own National Security Council files, including near-verbatim transcripts of his face-to-face negotiations with communist leaders. For example, before his first secret meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Kissinger scribbled in the margins of his briefing book, “We want a decent interval. You have our assurance.” Face to face with Zhou, Kissinger was even more blunt: “If the government [of South Vietnam] is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene.”

Zhou reminded Kissinger that America was demanding a ceasefire.

“We can put on a time limit, say 18 months or some period,” Kissinger replied. In other words, a year or two. The ceasefire would be public, but its expiration date would be secret — not from the communists, of course, but from the American people. 

While Ferguson gets ample time to obfuscate, other, better scholars get little time to squeeze in some truth. John A. Farrell is the author of the best one-volume biography of Richard Nixon published to date — and the first to draw on deep research into the declassified record to show how Nixon and Kissinger played politics with American lives. “Kissinger” quotes Farrell as saying, “Nixon and Kissinger definitely knew that the deal they signed in January 1973 would condemn South Vietnam to eventual defeat.” That is true, and it’s the best 10 seconds of this documentary, but viewers won’t know what to make of it without the declassified evidence.

The documentary’s superficiality is reflected in its peculiar use of animation. The antiwar movement is represented by cartoon protestors waving cartoon signs. The metaphor of foreign policy as a chess game is literalized with a cartoon Kissinger eyeing cartoon chess pieces. The secret bombing of Cambodia — which did lead to a genocide — is illustrated by cartoon bombs bursting over a cartoon map. Treating life-or-death matters in an explicitly cartoonish manner is a graphic self-own.

To its credit, “Kissinger” quotes flesh and blood humans recounting some of the horrors Nixon and Kissinger’s policies visited on other nations, such as Cambodia and Bangladesh. But their testimony alone can’t expose the devil’s bargain of realpolitik, which seduces the unwary with the notion that making others suffer will benefit us. A better documentary about Kissinger would detail the suffering he inflicted at home as well as abroad.

Open with the terror of Kissinger’s German childhood, focusing on the “stabbed-in-the-back” myth (Dolchstoßlegende) the Nazis used to gain power, a false narrative blaming Germany’s defeat in World War II not on superior American fighting power but on a host of domestic scapegoats they defamed as “traitors” and the “enemy within” — members of the German parliament, the press, Socialists, Communists, Jews.

Acknowledge young Henry Kissinger’s physical courage, his enlistment as a young refugee in the American army, his willingness to risk his life in the battle to liberate Europe from Hitler. Highlight the lessons he drew from the concentration camps, starting with the ones “Kissinger” includes (“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals, had no chance…it was a necessity to follow through with a singleness of purpose”) but including a few that “Kissinger” left out (“Such singleness of purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values. It had to disregard ordinary standards of morality. One could only survive through lies, tricks…”).

Lest anyone assume that these were the only lessons he could have drawn, quote concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote that “only the men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside eventually fell victim to the camp’s degenerating influences.”

Trace Kissinger’s swift postwar ascent through the ranks of Harvard from undergraduate to graduate to PhD to professor, focusing on how he parlayed his Ivy League credentials into an exalted place in the Cold War political firmament. Emphasize the roles he and Nixon played in creating the problems they later took credit for (kinda sorta) solving:

• The Self-Sabotaging Isolation of China. Following the 1949 Communist Chinese Revolution, Rep. Dick Nixon [R–California] won a seat in the U.S. Senate on a platform of cutting off trade with China, keeping it out of the United Nations and denying it U.S. diplomatic recognition. As president, he would reverse the first two policies, but only begin to reverse the third.
• An Unnecessary Nuclear Arms Race. In the early 1960s, when America had roughly 20 times as many nuclear missiles as Russia, Kissinger was one of many Cold War intellectuals, politicians and professional Chicken Littles who warned that the Russian arsenal would soon outstrip ours. This was not so, but fears of a “missile gap” spurred America to build hundreds of unnecessary nuclear weapons. Russia did likewise. Once Nixon was president, he and Kissinger negotiated an agreement that put a cap on additional missiles, without eliminating any of the ones already in place.
• The Vietnam War. Both Nixon and Kissinger publicly supported President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Americanization of the war before they timed their de-Americanization of it to Nixon’s reelection.

Zoom in on the sordid underbelly of Nixon and Kissinger’s crowning diplomatic achievement, “triangular diplomacy,” sold to America as a clever way to play China off Russia, Russia off China and both off North Vietnam, and thereby pull a Vietnam peace agreement out of a hat, but now exposed as the way Nixon and Kissinger secretly assured the Communists that they could go ahead and conquer South Vietnam without fear of American intervention as long as they held off for a “decent interval.”

Note the irony of celebrating Nixon and Kissinger for abandoning the ruinous policies toward Russia, China and Vietnam that they had risen to power advocating. Gaze with horror on the mass suffering they inflicted on Indochina, their death toll certainly in the hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions, all to create the illusion that they were doing something more than slowly losing a war while furtively arranging a secret surrender. Trace the terrible connection between what they did to other nations and what they did to our own. 

Finally, reject the “stab-in-the-back” myth they manufactured to blame the consequences of their actions on domestic scapegoats — Congress, the news media, the antiwar movement and, ultimately, the antiwar majority of the American people. See how they divided America to conquer it, sowing hatred while calling for unity behind themselves and their misbegotten policies. Observe how Kissinger came full circle, from defiant victim of one backstabbing myth to craven author of another, the physical courage of his youth giving way to the moral cowardice of his middle age, his social ascent equaled only by his moral descent.

That would give viewers the real “American Experience” of Henry Kissinger.