What Exactly Did Henry Kissinger Do?

Great Debates
1

Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) was the Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and apparently Gerald Ford too.

Anyway, I often read these articles about him being responsible for Pinochet. Pinochet was a particularly evil, fascist dictator in Chile. In fact he was so evil, he tortured most of his countrymen at some point or another.

I don’t have a cite just yet. And maybe it’s just as well. Because that is where all the articles about him trail off. How was he responsible for Pinochet? What exactly did he do? AFAIK Mr. Kissinger has never been to Chile.

And yes, I did put this in Great Debates, because there’s more. Some people think that Kissinger was one of the greatest Secretaries of State. And some think that he is a war criminal for the aforementioned reason.

Which is it?

I probably would never have voted for him or Nixon. But I admire people like him and Nixon from afar. Nixon, among other things, opened up China. If he didn’t resign in disgrace, he would have probably gone down as one of our greatest presidents. Think about it.

But Kissinger has to be careful where he travels, because he risks arrest. How many Secretaries of State can say that?

Anyway, what did Mr. Kissinger specifically do? And is he a hero? Or a war criminal? I must not be the only person who wonders.

:slight_smile:

2

It is believed that Kissinger was one of the leading voices in the U.S. government behind the CIA’s support of the coup which led to the death of Salavador Allende (a pro-Cuba socialist), and the rise to power of Pinochet.

In addition, Kissinger appears to have had influence in the events which led to the assassination of two Pinochet foes, Orlando Letelier and Rene Schneider.

3

^ Aye; Kissinger was more a schemer than a diplomat.

4

Dang guy is 97 years old and still kicking it. I too, always wondered what exactly his purported role was in the whole Pinochet thing.

5

I respect Kissinger: he is/was a really smart guy, very well educated, thought about what he was doing, although he wasn’t able to achieve all he was trying for.

But I think he made a fundamental (and very American) mistake by thinking that foreign policy was critically about the people in power, rather than about the economic and geographic forces that drove them.

6

What is easier to change?

7

I always go with War Criminal especially because of Cambodia. I don’t know about his dealings in Chile.

8

Has anyone tried asking him?

~Max

9

Here is an article from The Guardian about a diplomatic cable describing a 1976 meeting between Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Pinochet.

~Max

10

And here is an article from The Los Angeles Times about another diplomatic cable involving Mr. Kissinger’s decision to put off warning Uruguay against going through with Condor operations (political repression & state terror in Latin America, planned and financed with help from the U.S.). It is argued, and Mr. Kissinger denies, that this cable had the effect of cancelling his previous instruction to ambassadors etc. to warn countries that Condor operations would undermine their relationship with the United States.

~Max

11

I believe Kissinger’s sins mostly revolve around supporting any regime, no matter how vicious, if that regime would stand in opposition to Russian backed Communism. Russian Communism was Kissinger’s biggest bugaboo and he opposed its spread with single minded resolve. I cannot understand why he looked at Chinese Communism through a more favorable lens. Perhaps because he viewed Chinese Communism to be regional to Asia as opposed to Russian Communism which challenged America on a more global scale. Also, China and Russia were not exactly allies at the time of the cold war.

12

Whatever Kissinger’s motivation for doing so, the fact that he convinced Bobby Fischer in 1972 to show up in Reykjavík and play Spassky should earn him at least an occasional splash of water to cool the eternal flames he’s soon to face.

13

Doesn’t the fact that a man like Henry Kissinger can have such a major impact on foreign policy disprove your point? If having men like him in power doesn’t make a difference, then how can he be blamed for anything?

14

Did he? My picture is that he had a major impact on people at the time, but made little difference to the present position of China, Russia, the USA, South America, Europe…

15

Technically, the first quotes Kissinger as saying that (at that moment in time) he doesn’t believe the accusations against Pinochet and the latter gives a modern explanation from Kissinger saying that the telegram is a small part of everything that was going on and that you shouldn’t blow the one message up into an entire policy platform.

Plausibly those are both true and, if more were known, his actions would be shown to have been completely innocent and impeccably humanitarian. …I doubt it - he probably accepted the tortures and killings as necessary evils - but I wouldn’t view either of the telegrams as conclusive, and certainly nowhere as conclusive as the first article makes out.

16

And today

17

All right so people say that you don’t care
But you’ve got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher

/obligatory Monty Python reference/

18

Earlier this month, Ted Koppel interviewed Kissinger for CBS Sunday Morning, and mentioned that some people at the show were “questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality.”

Koppel went on to mention some of those things, like the bombing of Cambodia, which really pissed him off, “This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old. And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

It was kind of funny in a way.

19

Kissinger, in an interview just published in the Wall St. Journal, warns against being “heedlessly adversarial” with China and urges “dialogue” through every means possible, which he says is not “appeasement”.

"Mr. Kissinger does believe, however, that the Biden administration has done “many things” right. “I support them on Ukraine,” he says. “From my perspective, the Ukraine war is won, in terms of precluding a Russian attack on allied nations in Europe. It is highly unlikely to occur again.” But there are “other dangers that can rise out of Russia. As we are ending the war, we should keep in mind that Russia was a major influence on the region for hundreds of years, caught in its own ambivalence between admiration and feelings of inferiority or of danger coming from Europe.” That ambivalence, he suggests, was behind this war: “I think the offer to put Ukraine into NATO was a grave mistake and led to this war. But its scale, and its nature, is a Russian peculiarity, and we were absolutely right to resist it.”

20

What did he think an interviewer was going task about, his latest jazz album? You interview a war criminal, the war crimes are going to come up.