The Trial of Henry Kissinger Read Online Free PDF Page B

understood was possible. This increases the gravity of the charge against him. It also prepares us for his improvised and retrospective defense against that charge - that his immense depredations eventually led to "peace." When he falsely and prematurely announced that "peace is now at hand" in October 1972, he made a boastful claim that could have been genuinely (and much less bloodily) made in 1967. And when he claimed credit for subsequent superpower contacts, he was announcing the result of a secret and corrupt diplomacy that had originally been proposed as an open and democratic one. In the meantime, he had illegally eavesdropped and shadowed American citizens and public servants whose misgivings about the war, and about unconstitutional authority, were mild compared to those of Messieurs Aubrac and Marcovich. In establishing what lawyers call the mens rea , we can say that in Kissinger's case he was fully aware of, and is entirely accountable for, his own actions.
    Upon taking office at Richard Nixon's side in the winter of 1968, it was Kissinger's task to be plus royaliste que le roi in two respects. He had to con-feet a rationale of "credibility" for punitive action in an already devastated Vietnamese theatre, and he had to second his principal's wish that he form part of a "wall" between the Nixon White House and the Department of State. The term "two-track" was later to become commonplace. Kissinger's position on both tracks, of promiscuous violence abroad and flagrant illegality at home, was decided from the start. He does not seem to have lacked relish for either commitment; one hopes faintly that this was not the first twinge of the "aphrodisiac."
    President Johnson's "bombing halt" had not lasted long by any standards, even if one remembers that its original conciliatory purpose had been sordidly undercut. Averell Harriman, who had been LBJ's chief negotiator in Paris, later testified to Congress that the North Vietnamese had withdrawn 90 percent of their forces from the northern two provinces of South Vietnam, in October-November 1968, in accordance with the agreement of which the halt might have formed a part. In the new context, however, this withdrawal could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, or even as a "light at the end of the tunnel."
    The historical record of the Indochina war is voluminous, and the resulting controversy no less so. However, this does not prevent the following of a consistent thread. Once the war had been unnaturally and undemocratically prolonged, more exorbitant methods were required to fight it and more fantastic excuses had to be fabricated to justify it. Let us take four separate but connected cases in which the civilian population was deliberately exposed to indiscriminate lethal force, in which the customary laws of war and neutrality were violated, and in which conscious lies had to be told in order to conceal these facts, and others.
    The first such case is an example of what Vietnam might have been spared had not the 1968
    Paris peace talks been sabotaged. In December 1968, during the "transition" period between the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the United States military command turned to what General Creighton Abrams termed "total war" against the "infrastructure" of the Vietcong/NLF insurgency. The chief exhibit in this campaign was a six-month clearance of the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. The code name for the sweep was Operation Speedy Express. (See pages 30-33.)
    It might, in some realm of theory, be remotely conceivable that such tactics could be justified under the international laws and charters governing the sovereign rights of self-defense. But no nation capable of deploying the overwhelming and annihilating force described below would be likely to find itself on the defensive. And it would be least of all likely to find itself on the defensive on its own soil. So the Nixon-Kissinger administration was not, except in one unusual sense, fighting for