Read The Trial of Henry Kissinger for Free Online

survival. The unusual sense in which its survival was at stake is set out, yet again, in the stark posthumous testimony of H.R. Haldeman. From his roost at Nixon's side he describes a Kissingerian moment on 15 December 1970: K[issinger] came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the P's big peace plan for next year, which K later told me he does not
    favor. 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.
    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. 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 Nix^i 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. 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. 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