Pushovers of the press

In his current, largely unreviewed book, "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," Christopher Hitchens is particularly convincing when he marshals evidence that Kissinger, who chaired the top covert action committee in Washington, was brain-deep in the planning of this grave offense to democratic government. He cites (as Kissinger does not) Kissinger's declassified memorandum of his 1976 conversation with Pinochet, in which, by his own account, Kissinger said to the dictator: "My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going Communist."

In his own book, Kissinger takes time from his general theory of foreign policy to congratulate Pinochet for his economics and to commiserate with him on his long-delayed arrest for human rights abuses in Britain in 1998. In an inadvertently comic observation, Kissinger declares that he himself ought to know what human rights agreements are for, having himself been their virtual founding father when he worked up the Helsinki Accord of 1975. So he knows that human rights initiatives were intended as "primarily a diplomatic weapon to use against Soviet pressure on their own and captive peoples, not as a legal weapon against individual leaders before courts of countries not their own." Beware the reckless gall, the soft-headedness of a Spanish judge or a tribunal in The Hague taking literally a treaty's words about human rights -- taking them at face value as a universal commitment!

Thus does Kissinger now oppose the trials of torturers and war criminals outside their homelands, insisting (in his book and in a Foreign Affairs article drawn from it) that "we must not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores." The globe-roaming Kissinger puffs himself up with a pose of high-mindedness in defense of national sovereignty. His own self-interest in stopping such trials fairly screams between the lines. On May 28, after all, he was issued a subpoena by a French judge interested in his testimony as to the disappearance of five French citizens in Chile under Pinochet -- a subpoena on which he turned his back. As Barbara Crossette recently wrote in the New York Times, "The arm of the law is growing longer and the world smaller for national leaders and others accused of atrocities." Indeed. Which is precisely Kissinger's concern.

No surprise, Kissinger cavalierly identifies his own safety with that of the state. Yet Mead, who ought to know better, is so enamored of Kissinger's exercise in self-exculpation that all he can say in objection to Kissinger's coverup on Chile is that "the behavior of the Chilean military and U.S. complicity with it during Pinochet's seizure of power marked one of the less edifying moments in the long Cold War." Edifying! Other adjectives come to mind -- defensible, honorable, decent and perhaps (as Hitchens suggests) legal.

Mead lauds this Kissinger quote, "A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great," as "some of the most eloquent and important words ever to issue from his pen." Possibly Mead means this as a backhanded compliment, though I doubt it. Political journalism is in desperate condition when a sentence like this rings the eloquence gong.

In the New York Times Book Review, Thomas Friedman a bit more judiciously credits Kissinger for, when considering intervention, "emphasiz[ing] the long causal chains, and what might happen at the end, rather than submit to any immediate emotions," and chides him for underestimating the force of economic globalization. But with vague allusions to the criticisms of "others," Friedman also lets Kissinger off the hook.

In a June 21 puff piece for the Boston Globe, a story in which Kissinger performs his avuncular act for 34 paragraphs, Mark Feeney finds room for four critical ones, but the criticisms consist of the usual banalities about the "dark side" of his career, his "role in the secret bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of the Socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the wiretapping of journalists and subordinates." On none of these "events was he then -- or is he now -- notably forthcoming," Feeney writes.

Any of Feeney's readers who is not familiar with that "role" will surely learn no more about it from this story. This is, after all, a gushing profile, like hundreds of others Kissinger has garnered in his career, lazily skimming the surface, alluding to "criticism" without citing or evaluating it, presupposing that the reader should not be troubled with messy fact. Even the Globe's sidebar on Hitchens' short book offers phrases but no particulars. If you want truth, damn it, reader, get thee to the library, but don't expect to find facts in what is after all only a newspaper.

So it goes in the halls of journalism. Kissinger has the herd cowed.

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