Kissinger

[ousdahl]

*

[Shirley]

"He's a thug, and a crook, and a liar, and a pseudo-intellectual and a murderer. All those things are factually verifiable. That he's an anti-communist is a speculation that he likes to encourage." - Christopher Hitchens on Henry Kissinger

[Shirley]

The Trials of Henry Kissinger -- based on the devastating book of the same name by Christopher Hitchens, directed by Eugene Jarecki. Worth watching, if you haven't.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

6 degrees of Gutter....

As a child I spoke with Kissinger in Dorado Beach Puerto Rico. If I only knew who he really was in regards to his "importance" I might have asked him some semi intelligent questions.
I recall fondly that my father was both pissed off (I think for show) and amused (I think truly) when I copied Kissinger's idiolect.

[Shirley]

6 degrees of Gutter....

As a child I spoke with Kissinger in Dorado Beach Puerto Rico. If I only knew who he really was in regards to his "importance" I might have asked him some semi intelligent questions.
I recall fondly that my father was both pissed off (I think for show) and amused (I think truly) when I copied Kissinger's idiolect.

Was Tubby with him?

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

6 degrees of Gutter....

As a child I spoke with Kissinger in Dorado Beach Puerto Rico. If I only knew who he really was in regards to his "importance" I might have asked him some semi intelligent questions.
I recall fondly that my father was both pissed off (I think for show) and amused (I think truly) when I copied Kissinger's idiolect.

Was Tubby with him?

I don't think so. I do know Nelson Rockefeller was there (with his family), as was Ed Koch, Bob Kraft, and probably a few other somewhat "known" people.

[zsn]

I don’t necessarily believe that there’s a heaven and a hell but I’m hoping that there’s a hell, Michelangelo style, just for Kissinger.

[ousdahl]

Didn’t know what direction this thread would go, and honestly kinda surprised.

If only we condemned war criminals in real time as much as we’re willing to in hindsight.

And ALL war criminals, rather than just picking and choosing based on the “consensus opinions” and other WMDs-in-Iraq sorts of narratives.

[japhy]

6 degrees of Gutter....

As a child I spoke with Kissinger in Dorado Beach Puerto Rico. If I only knew who he really was in regards to his "importance" I might have asked him some semi intelligent questions.
I recall fondly that my father was both pissed off (I think for show) and amused (I think truly) when I copied Kissinger's idiolect.

When I think of hanging out with Gutter, blunt in hand at a future Solstice, I imagine it to be like a live performance of "Forrest Gump".

[ousdahl]

so that was the time gutter met the president…again…

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

6 degrees of Gutter....

As a child I spoke with Kissinger in Dorado Beach Puerto Rico. If I only knew who he really was in regards to his "importance" I might have asked him some semi intelligent questions.
I recall fondly that my father was both pissed off (I think for show) and amused (I think truly) when I copied Kissinger's idiolect.

When I think of hanging out with Gutter, blunt in hand at a future Solstice, I imagine it to be like a live performance of "Forrest Gump".

That was the best laugh I have had in some time! Thank you!!!

I could imagine people sitting around and then slowly getting up to walk away - and then running away as fast as they could as soon as I was out of sight. I'd be sitting there saying......

[ousdahl]

[ousdahl]

Oh, and here’s your reminder that Kissinger was also a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Shirley]

11/30/23

Friends,

Henry Kissinger has died, at the age of 100.

When a former high government official as well known as Kissinger passes, the conventional response is to say nice things about what they accomplished.

I’m sorry but I cannot. In my humble opinion, Kissinger should have been considered a war criminal.

One telling illustration was Kissinger’s role in overthrowing the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, and encouraging the mass murder of hundreds of innocent Chileans.

On September 12, 1970, eight days after Allende’s election, Kissinger initiated a discussion on the telephone with CIA Director Richard Helms about a preemptive coup in Chile.

“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared.

“I am with you,” Helms responded.

Three days later, Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.

Kissinger ignored a recommendation from his top deputy on the NSC, Viron Vaky, who strongly advised against covert action to undermine Allende.

On September 14, 1970, Vaky wrote a memo to Kissinger arguing that coup plotting would lead to “widespread violence and even insurrection.” He also argued that such a policy was immoral: “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets .… If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.”

After U.S. covert operations, which led to the assassination of Chilean Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces General Rene Schneider, failed to stop Allende’s inauguration on November 4, 1970, Kissinger lobbied Nixon to reject the State Department’s recommendation that the U.S. seek a modus vivendi with Allende.

While Schneider was dying in the Military Hospital in Santiago on October 22, 1970, Kissinger told Nixon that the Chilean military turned out to be “a pretty incompetent bunch.” Nixon replied: “They are out of practice,” according to documents released in August by the U.S. National Security Archive.

In an eight-page secret briefing paper that provided Kissinger’s clearest rationale for regime change in Chile, he emphasized to Nixon that “the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere” and “your decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will make this year.”

Not only were a billion dollars of U.S. investments at stake, Kissinger reported, but so was what he called “the insidious model effect” of his democratic election.

There was no way for the U.S. to deny Allende’s legitimacy, Kissinger noted, and if he succeeded in peacefully reallocating resources in Chile in a socialist direction, other countries might follow suit.

“The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”

The next day Nixon made it clear to the entire National Security Council that the policy would be to bring Allende down. “Our main concern,” he stated, “is the prospect that he can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success.”

In the days following the September 11, 1973, coup, Kissinger ignored the concerns of his top State Department aides about the massive repression by the new military regime. He sent secret instructions to his ambassador to convey to Pinochet “our strongest desires to cooperate closely and establish firm basis for cordial and most constructive relationship.”

When Kissinger’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs asked him what to tell Congress about the reports of hundreds of people being killed in the days following the coup, Kissinger issued these instructions: “I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was.”

The United States assisted the Pinochet regime in consolidating, through economic and military aid, diplomatic support and CIA assistance in creating Chile’s infamous secret police agency, DINA.

When Nixon complained about the “liberal crap” in the media about Allende’s overthrow, Kissinger advised him: “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”

At the height of Pinochet’s repression in 1975, Kissinger met with the Chilean foreign minister, Admiral Patricio Carvajal.

Rather than press the military regime to improve its human rights record, Kissinger opened the meeting by disparaging his own staff for putting the issue of human rights on the agenda.

“I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights,” Kissinger told Carvajal. “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”

When Kissinger prepared to meet Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976, his top deputy for Latin America, William D. Rogers, advised him make human rights central to U.S.-Chilean relations and to press the dictator to “improve human rights practices.”

Instead, a declassified transcript of their conversation reveals, Kissinger told Pinochet that his regime was a victim of leftist propaganda on human rights. “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet. “We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.”

The Chilean government has formally requested that the Biden administration publish documentation from 1973 and 1974 on what was said in the Oval Office before and after the coup led by Pinochet.

“We still don’t know what President Nixon saw on his desk the morning of the military coup,” Chile’s ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdés, says. “There are details that remain of interest to [Chileans], that are important for us to reconstruct our own history.”

An appropriate response to Kissinger’s death would be for the U.S. to own up to the entirety of what Nixon and Kissinger wrought.

Robert Reich

Reich worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton.

[Sparko]

That article makes him seem pretty evil. But remember, he also prolonged the Vietnam War for political benefit by iillegally intervening in the 1968 peace talks. So "Nobel"

[Shirley]

That article makes him seem pretty evil. But remember, he also prolonged the Vietnam War for political benefit by iillegally intervening in the 1968 peace talks. So "Nobel"

I know Sparko, and between 20,000 and 25,000 additional Americans, and who knows how many more Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodians died, because Kissinger and Nixon convinced the S Vietnamese not to agree to a settlement, so they'd have a better chance to win the '68 election.

I resisted the urge to start a thread about him after he passed, and have resisted venting my spleen about him in this thread. But copying and pasting Reich's thoughts was easy.

[Shirley]

This is from Politico. It's a long explanation of how Nixon, as I said in a previous post, sabotaged the peace talks of the Johnson Admin in 1968 to keep Johnson and his Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was Nixon's opponent in the '68 presidential election, from solving their very unpopular Viet Nam war problem on the eve of the '68 election.

There's an amazing amount of intrigue. LBJ knew much of what was going on, but couldn't pin it directly on Nixon with certainty, or make public what he knew without revealing that he was bugging both the South Vietnamese leadership, and Nixon. As detailed below, LBJ actually called Nixon about it, but Nixon lied to him, denying he was involved.

Russia makes an appearance in the story too. Nixon had been a strong, vocal "red-baiting" anti-communist for years, and was not popular in Moscow. The Russians weren't eager for Nixon to win in '68, so they were pushing the North Vietnamese to agree to a settlement to help Humphrey and hurt Nixon.

By doing what he could to delay a peace agreement, Nixon played a part in the deaths of an additional 20,000 - 25,000 Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, et al. Which is not to say that there weren't other factors that likely also kept the peace talks from working, but still...

When a Candidate Conspired With a Foreign Power to Win An Election. It took decades to unravel Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam peace talks. Now, the full story can be told.

Richard Nixon’s telephone calls came regularly during the 1968 campaign. And H.R. Haldeman took meticulous notes, jotting down the instructions he received from the candidate.

...In one series of scribbles, Haldeman reported Henry Kissinger’s willingness to inform on his U.S. diplomatic colleagues, and keep Nixon updated on President Lyndon Johnson’s furious, eleventh-hour efforts to end the Vietnam War.

In late October 1968, the two men connected on what came to be known as “the Chennault Affair.” Nixon gave Haldeman his orders: Find ways to sabotage Johnson’s plans to stage productive peace talks, so that a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war.

The gambit worked, and the Chennault Affair, named for Anna Chennault, the Republican doyenne and fundraiser who became Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government, lingered as a diplomatic and political whodunit for decades afterward.

Johnson and his aides suspected this treachery at the time, for the Americans were eavesdropping on their South Vietnamese allies—(“Hold on,” Anna was heard telling the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington. “We are gonna win”)—but hesitated to expose it because they had no proof Nixon had personally directed, or countenanced, her actions. Historians scoured archives for evidence that Chennault was following the future president’s instructions, without much luck. Nixon steadfastly denied involvement up until his death, while his lawyers fended off efforts to obtain records from the 1968 campaign.

It wasn’t until after 2007, when the Nixon Presidential Library finally opened Haldeman’s notes to the public, that I stumbled upon a smoking gun in the course of conducting research for my biography of Nixon: four pages of notes his brush-cut aide had scrawled late on an October evening in 1968. “!Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” Haldeman wrote, as Nixon barked orders into the phone. They were out to “monkey wrench” Johnson’s election eve initiative, Nixon said. And it worked.

The following account of the Chennault Affair is the most up-to-date and revealing exposure of Nixon’s intrigue—the product of hours of archival research, open records requests and a little luck. Documenting this cynical maneuver is important for history’s sake, but the fact that it took nearly 50 years for Nixon’s secret to emerge also offers vital lessons for today. It shows how hard it is to find definitive proof of collaboration with a foreign power when officials are determined to hide the truth. It illustrates why a president might hesitate to call out such malfeasance by a candidate from the opposing political party. And it demonstrates the lengths an ambitious politician will go in the pursuit of power—even at the expense of his own country’s interests.

As investigators rush to understand just what President Donald Trump knew about Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 election and when he knew it, the Chennault Affair—and how Nixon got away with it—is as relevant than ever.

***

Nixon was especially anxious on the night October 22, 1968. He had entered the fall campaign with a formidable lead over Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but the polls were narrowing as working-class Democrats returned to their party and Johnson’s efforts to make peace made news. Nixon believed he would prevail, unless a major event reset the political topography. He knew that Johnson knew that too.

As did the Soviet Union. Kremlin leaders had never much liked the red-baiting, anti-communist Nixon. To keep him from the Oval Office, and help Humphrey become president, they were meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign—pressing their clients in North Vietnam to agree to a ceasefire and hold constructive talks to end the war.

According to Haldeman’s notes, Kissinger alerted the Nixon campaign in late September, and again in early October, that something was up. Johnson was willing to halt the U.S. bombing of the North, and with the Soviets applying pressure on Hanoi to meet certain American conditions, the odds were never better for an early settlement of the conflict, which had already claimed 30,000 American lives and torn America apart.

Nixon had no influence in Moscow, or Hanoi. But he was not completely vulnerable to events. He had that pipeline to Saigon, where South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and his associates feared that LBJ was selling them out. If Thieu would drag his feet, and stall the proposed peace talks, Nixon could portray Johnson’s failed peace initiative as a desperate political trick. But to do so, Nixon had to get word to Thieu, and tell him to stand firm.

Nixon’s main conduit was Chennault, the Chinese-American widow of Claire Chennault, the American aviator who led squadrons of “Flying Tigers” into battle on behalf of China against the Japanese invaders during World War II. She had many friends in the palaces of South Vietnam, nationalist China and the other pro-Western countries on the Asian rim.

Nixon also told Haldeman to have Rose Mary Woods, the candidate’s devoted secretary, contact another member of the pro-nationalist “China Lobby”—businessman Louis Kung—and have him pressure Thieu as well. She was to get Kung “going on the SVN—tell him hold firm,” Nixon ordered Haldeman.

The Nixon campaign’s sabotage of Johnson’s peace process was successful. Nine days later, Thieu’s decision to boycott the talks headlined The New York Times and other U.S. newspapers, reminding American voters of their long-harbored mistrust of the wheeler-dealer LBJ and his “credibility gap” on Vietnam. Humphrey’s momentum faded.

LBJ was furious. His national security adviser, Walt Rostow, urged him to unmask Nixon’s treachery. Humphrey’s aides told their boss to expose the episode and disgrace their Republican foes. But Johnson and Humphrey balked. They didn’t have proof that Nixon had personally directed her actions.

And so Nixon won the 1968 election, and led America further into carnage in Southeast Asia. In the years that followed, many elements of the Chennault Affair came to light, but Nixon stuck by his denials that he participated in the scheme. The lack of evidence of Nixon’s direct involvement gave pause to historians, and offered his loyalists a platform from which to defend him. But no longer. Haldeman’s notes are the long-sought evidence that Nixon personally intervened to scuttle Johnson’s efforts to end the war. It’s now possible to reconstruct the events of October and November 1968 with the inescapable conclusion that Nixon’s behavior was devious, tragic and, given the lives at stake, arguably more reprehensible than his activities in the Watergate scandal.

[...]