Our Own Private Pinochet: Prosecuting Henry Kissinger

Does America Need a Foreign Policy?By Henry Kissinger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 288 pp. $21.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger. By Christopher Hitchens (New York: Verso, 2001). 150 pp. $22.

In 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon's special assistant for national security affairs, was invited to Johns Hopkins University-SAIS to speak on the conflict. Given the school's long ties to the national security establishment, Kissinger doubtlessly expected a fawning reception. What he got instead surprised everyone. A group of students interrupted his introduction, rising from the audience to read a prepared statement about their opposition to the war in general and Kissinger's handling of it in particular. Taking the podium, the bemused potentate muttered, "I'll just go straight to the questions." He called upon one of the students who had risen moments before. The kid rose and asked Kissinger if he considered himself a war criminal.

An understandably awkward silence followed. Kissinger finally turned to the emcee, said, "Get your people under control," and strode from the auditorium. For more than twenty years after that day, he refused to set foot inside the school.

In 2001, the SAIS graduating class invited Henry Kissinger to give the commencement address. He refused, citing a prior commitment, but it is easy to picture the satisfaction a man with as elephantine a memory as Kissinger's must have taken from the request. Whatever controversy his name might still provoke among those who lived through his years in power, it would appear that Kissinger's rehabilitation, or rather habilitation, among the younger generation is complete.

Yet despite his decades-long effort to rebuild his image after the debacle of the Nixon administration--the titanic memoirs, the op-ed pieces, the speaking engagements--Kissinger's historical legacy is still undecided. His latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, is an attempt to convince the country of his indispensability, but it had the bad luck to be released within a few months of Christopher Hitchens's excoriating Trial of Henry Kissinger, an extended argument for hauling Kissinger before a war crimes tribunal. The stakes are high, for both the man and his beliefs. Realpolitik in the United States is so closely tied to Kissinger's policies that its reputation will rise and fall with his--should Henry Kissinger one day be mentioned in the same breath as Pinochet or Milosevic rather than Metternich or Machiavelli, his beliefs will be tarred with the same brush. These two books, and the differing ways they have been received, give us some idea of what form Henry Kissinger's legacy might take.

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Kissinger is not the first sacred cow that Hitchens has barbecued. Four years ago, in The Missionary Position, he took Mother Theresa to task for promoting Catholic dogma in lieu of relieving suffering. The Washington Post Book World, when it mentioned that Hitchens had blasted Kissinger, remarked, "Hitchens, who has written a book attacking Mother Theresa, may have a higher standard of morality than the rest of us." ¹ The sentence reduces Hitchens to a fanatic, and lets us chuckle at his supposed histrionics. Yet Hitchens's strength as a critic (he has penned several collections of essays, detailed and passionate studies of the Cypriots and the Kurds, and, for balance, one of the most damning assessments of the Clinton administration yet written) flows directly from his obstinate refusal to let people slide because they are old, beloved, or powerful. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, his target is the uneven application of "universal jurisdiction"--the principle of international law by which a state is empowered to prescribe punishment for certain crimes, regardless of the nationality of the offender or victim or where the crime was committed. Through his critique, he reveals our tendency to confuse righteousness with self-righteousness.

To be clear, Hitchens supports the extension of universal jurisdiction over government officials...