SECRETS
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by DAVID DENBY
The New Yorker
"The Trials of Henry Kissinger"
Issue of 2002-10-07
newyorker.com
At the beginning of the documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," the then national-security adviser to Richard Nixon grins broadly, his eyes shining behind the dark-framed glasses that became his signature. In his late forties, the statesman-professor has the bulk and the stiffness, but not the gloom, of a homely man; his smile exudes a sensual enjoyment of power which even a child would have noticed. When Kissinger ascends to the office of Secretary of State, in 1973, he glows like a newlywed. One of the many remarkable sights in the film, which was funded by the BBC and will be shown at Film Forum through October 8th, is the way that, in later years, Kissinger's bowlike lower lip hardens into an angry horizontal whenever anyone asks him a hostile question. The film is an exposé of the corrosiveness of power; it claims that the retired diplomat, now a seventy-nine-year-old businessman, has a lot to be defensive about, that his enjoyment of power was not an innocent pleasure but a vice. "Trials," which premièred on British television last March, is an eighty-minute response to the most hostile question of all: At a time when Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet have been arrested for crimes against humanity, shouldn't Kissinger also be held legally accountable for what his policies led to in Cambodia, in Chile, and in East Timor? Several former American officials, including Roger Morris, who worked under Kissinger at the National Security Council, think so, as do a number of American and British jurists and journalists.
The complaints against Kissinger have been around in one form or another for three decades. What precipitated the production of the film was the publication, in 2001, of Christopher Hitchens's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," a book based on his two-part article in Harper's. In the documentary, Hitchens says of Kissinger, "I think he's a war criminal; I think he's a liar; I think he's responsible for kidnapping, for murder." Hitchens is notoriously fond of moral melodrama, but his charges are reinforced by the sombre British journalist William Shawcross, the author of "Sideshow" (an account of the American incursion into Cambodia), and by Seymour M. Hersh, who marvels at Kissinger's ability, year after year, to escape retribution. For Hersh, Kissinger is the big fish who has always wriggled out of the net. The essence of the journalists' complaints is that Kissinger was repeatedly indifferent to human suffering and democratic procedure during a long period of overzealous devotion to Cold War strategy; and that, personally, he was duplicitous and ruthless right from the beginning of his government career. In interviews with Kissinger's former aide Daniel Davidson and others, the film recounts how, in the fall of 1968, when the outgoing President, Lyndon Johnson, and the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, were sponsoring peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese, Kissinger served as an unofficial adviser to the American negotiators. At the same time, however, he was sending information to Humphrey's opponent, Richard Nixon, a man he hated, whereupon Nixon used his own channels to convince President Nguyen Van Thieu, of South Vietnam, that the Republicans could get him a better deal. Three days before the American election, Thieu withdrew his approval from the developing peace plan, at which point the talks collapsed. Humphrey was discredited, Nixon was narrowly elected, and Kissinger, who until then had worked for Nelson Rockefeller, was made national-security adviser. Obsessed with American "credibility," Kissinger and Nixon secretly expanded the war into Cambodia. Four years passed from the time of Nixon's Inauguration, and another twenty thousand Americans and untold Vietnamese and Cambodians died before Kissinger worked out a peace deal with North Vietnam, which was almost identical to the arrangement he had helped sabotage in 1968.
This is serious stuff, and there's much more in a similar vein, a lot of which might be unfamiliar to younger audiences. I wish, however, that Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney, who wrote, directed, and produced "Trials," had gone beyond the usual mosaic style of film journalism, the brisk summary in which short interview and newsreel fragments are joined together with voice-over narration. This method of pointed assemblage is no doubt the best way to convey a great deal of information quickly, and several of the episodes are both skillful and detailed—the investigation, for instance, into American complicity, in 1975, in the genocidal campaign of Indonesian military forces in East Timor. But is the method equal to the gravity and complexity of the subject? Jarecki and Gibney devote some time to Kissinger's farcical career as a "swinger," but they gloss over his achievements in playing off the Soviet Union and China against each other and thereby hastening the American victory in the Cold War—the cause for which, after all, Kissinger's more dubious actions were taken. I understand the desire to cut through complications and ambivalence, but the subject demands something besides outrage; it needs the scale and thoughtfulness of a Marcel Ophuls documentary, in which a given case is made all the more convincing by the filmmaker's patiently overcoming objections to it, both large and small. Kissinger declined to speak with the filmmakers, but Alexander Haig, his former aide and defender, was interviewed, and he is frequently cut off by the editors in mid-sentence. Haig's remarks strike me as both cynical and evasive, but I would like to hear him complete his thoughts. And, if Kissinger refused to coöperate, couldn't the filmmakers have turned to his memoirs for his defense of various actions? The movie feels not only like a trial but like a trial in absentia.
The subject of Henry Kissinger's alleged criminality is deeply unpleasant, and, as the movie began, I felt a wave of distaste—no, not these old controversies once again. The suggestion of a legal proceeding seemed a mere fantasy. And yet the BBC report, whatever its imperfections, is just good enough to get under your skin. If you absorb the rapid flow of claims, you may think, There's enough documented information here to make a trial plausible. And the film forces Americans, willy-nilly, to confront elements in our history which threaten to resurface in the present. That power is corrosive is hardly news. And perhaps it's not news that men in power will claim that their actions are motivated by serious threats to America which they are not quite prepared to make public. Yet the question remains: In a democratic society, how can a statesman be effective without the practice of subterfuge? If the answer is "He can't," it would be nice to have Kissinger explain why. |
