I Cogitate

Saying Nothing, But Still Power-hungry

John R. MacArthur
June 9, 2007
[Originally from The Providence Journal, June 5, 2007]

They say America is the land of the second chance -- the chance to make good on a promise, a project or a virtuous deed that might lead to redemption. But in the case of Henry Kissinger, the chances never seem to run out, no matter how much harm he does.

Twice in the last two months I've heard the world's most famous (and venal) diplomat -- now said by Bob Woodward to be advising President Bush on Iraq -- make speeches that might be deemed comical if they were-n't so depressingly emblematic of this country's endless tolerance for con men, courtiers and failures. Kissinger should have run out his string years ago, but there he was, nearly 84 and still vigorous, commanding the rapt attention of people who by now should know better.

How does he get away with it? The crimes committed by Kissinger in the service of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford are well known, exhaustively described by William Shawcross, Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens, among others. I've always thought that Kissinger's role in pointlessly prolonging the carnage of Vietnam while Nixon's national security adviser was his greatest sin. But I don't mean to minimize his other acts of diplomatic debauchery, both large (contributing to the destruction of Cambodia and the overthrow of Salvadore Allende, in Chile), and smaller (giving the green light to Indonesia's immensely bloody invasion, and subsequent occupation, of East Timor).

Kissinger's Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations

Scott Sherman
The Nation
[from the December 27, 2004 issue]

Last year Kenneth Maxwell, a soft-spoken 63-year-old historian of Latin America, published a review of Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability in the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. As The Nation reported in June [see Sherman, "The Maxwell Affair," June 21], Maxwell's essay enraged two former statesmen with deep connections to the council--Henry Kissinger and his longtime associate William Rogers. Indeed, Maxwell was soon confiding to close friends, "I have clearly trodden on the tail of a very nasty snake here." On May 13 Maxwell resigned from the council, where for fifteen years he had served as the chief Latin Americanist, and from Foreign Affairs, where he was the Western Hemisphere book reviewer, a perch from which he had published more than 300 reviews. What triggered Maxwell's resignation was a smoldering exchange with Rogers in Foreign Affairs--an exchange, Maxwell insists, that was abruptly curtailed after Kissinger applied direct and indirect pressure on the editor of the journal, James Hoge. "The Council's current relationship with Mr. Kissinger," Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter to Hoge, "evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure. This I want no part of."

Now, after months of silence about that suppressed debate, Maxwell has emerged with a 13,000-word essay about the affair, "The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs." His treatise, which is based on e-mail correspondence and a detailed personal diary he kept throughout the controversy, has been published as a heavily footnoted working paper by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, where Maxwell is currently a senior fellow and visiting professor of history (the paper can be viewed at the center's website at drclas.fas.harvard.edu). "The Case of the Missing Letter" is a riveting account of a row that has generated headlines throughout Latin America; it is also an unprecedented X-ray of power politics, cronyism and hubris inside the country's pre-eminent foreign policy think tank. That Maxwell's document should carry the imprimatur of the Rockefeller Center at Harvard is an exquisite coincidence, since David Rockefeller himself was chairman of the council's board from 1970 to 1985.

Maxwell's review of Kornbluh's book, "The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973," was not a fiery polemic but a measured assessment of US intervention in Chile in the early 1970s. Leslie Gelb, who was president of the council from 1993 to 2003, told Maxwell that he read it three times and felt that, politically, it was "straight down the middle." Halfway through the piece, Maxwell criticized the Nixon-era policy-makers--primarily Kissinger--who contributed to the toppling of Chilean president Salvador Allende. "What is truly remarkable," he wrote, "is the effort...to bring a Latin American democracy down, and the meager efforts since to build democracy back up."

Kissinger, who has been affiliated with the council off and on since 1955, and Rogers, who served three terms on its board of directors, reacted swiftly to an essay that might have otherwise generated little notice on its own. Rogers, who worked with Kissinger at the State Department and is currently vice chair of Kissinger Associates, dispatched a furious letter to Foreign Affairs, which appeared in the January/February 2004 issue. "The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives," Rogers wrote. "There is...no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists." Rogers also endeavored to minimize Kissinger's involvement in two highly controversial matters that figure prominently in Kornbluh's book: the murder of Chilean Gen. René Schneider in 1970 and Operation Condor, a state-sponsored terror network set up by General Pinochet that from 1975 to 1977 targeted critics all over the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Among Condor's victims was Orlando Letelier, Pinochet's most prominent opponent in the United States, who was murdered, along with Ronni Moffitt, by a car bomb in Washington, DC, in 1976.

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