You find out pretty fast in this compact, inflammatory book by Christopher Hitchins that the author is no fan of Henry Kissinger; on page five readers are told that Kissinger's "manners are rather gross and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts". Mr Hitchins, in a hard-hitting 150 pages, makes no effort to strike a balance in his charges against Kissinger. This is the case for the prosecution and a compelling case it is too.
Kissinger was probably the most successful US Secretary of State since Dean Acheson who served under Harry Truman, if one defines successful as achieving what the individual wanted. Kissinger was certainly the best-known Secretary of State both within and without the US; an unashamed egocentric, he proved to be a master of self-promotion. When Richard Nixon won the race for the White House in 1968, Kissinger ("a mediocre, opportunistic academic", according to Hitchins) was plucked from giving lectures at Harvard's Center for International Affairs to become National Security Advisor.
Nixon chose William Rogers as his Secretary of State but from the outset it was clear that Nixon intended that he himself and not Rogers would conduct foreign policy and it was through Kissinger that policy was conducted.
"All you need", Nixon once wrote, "is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy". After four years, of being by-passed or simply ignored, Rogers jacked it in and Kissinger took over the State department. Henry found himself in the driving seat and left much to his own devices by a president whose energies were being consumed by the Watergate fallout. Later, after Nixon's fall, Kissinger had it even more his own way because Gerry Ford had neither the inclination or the ability to be hands-on in foreign policy.
The author's allegations against Kissinger range from unsurprising to startling. He accuses him of involvement in the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina. Nothing surprising in that given the hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians, amongst others, whose lives were lost in waves of bombing raids kept secret from Congress.
Neither will readers be surprised by Hitchins's charge that Kissinger did all he could to topple the democratically-elected Marxist government in Chile. Kissinger once remarked that he saw no reason why a country (Chile) should be allowed to go Marxist merely because "its people are irresponsible". However, Mr Hitchins maintains that Kissinger was personally involved in plotting the murder of Chile's Chief of the General Staff, Gen Rene Schneider, who was strongly opposed to any military meddling with the electoral process.
Walter Issacson was one of Kissinger's more objective biographers and he accepted that Henry distanced himself from the plot against Schneider.
Hitchins will have none of it. The evidence he produces is persuasive and Kissinger's defence is not helped by the fact that he lied through his teeth about Chile from the outset, as when in the Secretary of State confirmation process, he told the Foreign Relations Committee that the US government had played no part in the coup which brought down the Chilian government. Deniability seldom lasts especially, as in the US, where freedom of information prevails and classified CIA documents eventually get released.
Hitchins lays against Kissinger the charge of personal involvement in the overthrow of President Makarios of Cyprus. The Greek dictatorship, of which the US government approved, wanted Makarios toppled. While Hitchins proves fairly conclusively that Kissinger could have but didn't stop the coup, he marshalls insufficient evidence of a "personal involvement in a plan to murder" Makarios. However, with the evidence he has amassed, he shows up Kissinger's economy with the actualit when writing his own memoirs. The White House Years, the first of three parts of his memoirs, ran to 1,476 pages and is more remarkable for what he left out than for what he included.
According to Hitchins, Kissinger also had a hand in the slaughter in East Timor and in Bangladesh when it broke away from Pakistan. In summary, Hitchins thinks Kissinger should be put on trial for war crimes. The likelihood of this happening is about zero but Hitchins reports on a very concerned Kissinger phone-call to Michael Korda, his publisher, when General Pinochet was arrested. It's a safe bet that Kissinger has been more selective about the countries he visited since then.
It is difficult to think of a modern-day US Secretary of State as flawed as Henry Kissinger. How someone who was so fortunate to escape persecution in Nazi Germany could direct a foreign policy which enthusiastically supported tyrannies and undermined democracies is hard to fathom. He did much of which he should be proud. His shuttle diplomacy, especially in the Middle East, was of great value and he displayed considerable expertise in executing Nixon's policy of detente with the Soviet Union and opening up relations with China - and Kissinger suffered the opprobrium of the conservative right for his success on both counts.
And yet his devotion to ruthless real-politik was such that, to get what he wanted, he operated happily in an apolitical, ethical void where human rights, democratic principles and international law counted for nothing. That Kissinger can remain so highly regarded in US mandarin circles says a lot about America's ambivalence to these principles which are supposedly central to its raison d'etre. That Kissinger should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize beggars belief.
Hitchins's book was born out of two articles for Harpers magazine which were published earlier in the year. It is far more readable than his 1999 destruction of Bill Clinton No One Left To Lie To and it is also more convincing. Dr Kissinger has yet to respond to Hitchins's well researched and cogently argued accusations.
Eoin McVey is Managing Editor of The Irish Times