I have been asking myself this question for quite some time.
Haldeman on Kissinger’s plans to manipulate the US election through obviously inhuman means:
[He thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the '72 elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of '72 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.]
Haldeman
One could hardly wish for it to be more plainly put than that. (And put, furthermore, by one of Nixon's chief partisans with no wish to discredit the re-election.)
But in point of fact Kissinger himself admits to almost as much in his own first volume of memoirs, The White House Years. The context is a meeting with General de Gaulle in which the old warrior demanded to know by what right the Nixon administration subjected Indochina to devastating bombardment.
De Gaulle
In his own account, Kissinger replies that "a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem." (When asked "Where?" Kissinger hazily proposed the Middle East.)
It is important to bear in mind that the future flatterer of Brezhnev and Mao, and the proponent of the manipulative “triangle" between them, was in no real position to claim that he made war in Indochina to thwart either.
He certainly did not dare try such a callow excuse on Charles de Gaulle. And indeed, the proponent of secret deals with China was in no very strong position to claim that he was combating Stalinism in general.
No, it all came down to "credibility," and to the saving of face.
It is known that 20,492 American servicemen lost their lives in Indochina between the day that Nixon and Kissinger took office and the day in 1972 that they withdrew United States forces and accepted the logic of 1968.
What if the families and survivors of these victims have to confront the fact that the "face" at risk was Kissinger's own?
Thus the colloquially entitled "Christmas bombing" of North Vietnam, begun during the same election campaign that Haldeman and Kissinger had so tenderly foreseen two years previously, and continued after that election had been won, must be counted as a war crime by any standard.
The bombing was not conducted for anything that could be described as "military reasons," but for twofold political reasons.
Are we all being heavily so suppressed because this man is trying so hard to keep his innumerable crimes from coming to public consciousness?
The first of these was domestic: to make a show of strength to extremists in Congress and to put the Democratic Party on the defensive.
The second reason was to persuade the South Vietnamese leaders like President Thieu-still intransigent after all those years-that their objections to a United States withdrawal were too nervous.
This, again, was the mortgage on the initial secret payment of 1968. When the unpreventable collapse occurred, in Vietnam and in Cambodia, in April and May 1975, the cost was infinitely higher than it would have been seven years previously.
These locust years ended as they had begun-with a display of bravado and deceit. On 12 May 1975, Cambodian gunboats detained an American merchant vessel named the Mayaguez.
In the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge seizure of power, the situation was a distraught one. The ship had been stopped in international waters claimed by Cambodia and then taken to the Cambodian island of Koh Tang.
How much of our recent history is Kissinger making self serving moves that harm the rest of us?
In spite of reports that the crew had been released, Kissinger pressed for an immediate face-saving and "credibility"-enhancing strike.
He persuaded President Gerald Ford, the untried and undistinguished successor to his deposed former boss, to send in the Marines and the Air Force.
Out of a Marine force of 110, 18 were killed and 50 wounded. Some 23 Air Force men died in a crash. The United States used a 15,000-pound bomb on the island, the most powerful non-nuclear device that it possessed.
Nobody has the figures for Cambodian deaths. The casualties were pointless because the ship's company of the Mayaguez were nowhere on Koh Tang, having been released some hours earlier.
A subsequent congressional inquiry found that Kissinger could have known of this by listening to Cambodian Broadcasting or by paying attention to a third-party government which had been negotiating a deal for the restitution of the crew and the ship.
It was not as if any Cambodians doubted, by that month of 1975, the willingness of the US government to employ deadly force. In Washington, DC, there is a famous and hallowed memorial to the American dead of the Vietnam War.
Being passive is a “deal with the devil” because we become complicit by not standing up against genocide and all this enslavement.
Known as the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, it bears a name that is slightly misleading. I was present for the extremely affecting moment of its dedication in 1982, and noticed that the list of nearly 60,000 names is incised in the wall not by alphabet but by date.
The first few names appear in 1954, and the last few in 1975. The more historically minded visitors can sometimes be heard to say that they didn't know the United States was engaged in Vietnam as early or as late as that.
Nor were the public supposed to know. The first names are of the covert operatives sent in by Colonel Lansdale without congressional approval to support French colonialism before Dien Bien Phu.
It is our duty and obligation to understand who is pulling the strings right now and for what purpose.
The last names are of those thrown away in the Mayaguez fiasco. It took Henry Kissinger to ensure that a war of atrocity, which he had helped prolong, should end as furtively and ignominiously as it had begun.