Kissinger's Kidnapper: Eqbal Ahmad, the U.S. New Left, and the Transnational Romance of Revolutionary War

Hatched over a dinner of chicken curry and rice, cold vin rosé, and cognac in a rural Connecticut farmhouse on the night of 17 August 1970, the plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger emerged from a discussion between two university professors, their wives, two Catholic nuns, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and an ex-Benedictine monk. Perhaps it was not surprising that one of these professors, Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani émigré and student of revolutionary warfare, proposed the original scheme: a "citizens' arrest" of a high-level Nixon administration official whose ransom, he suggested, should be nothing less than the cessation of the United States' bombing in North Vietnam. Ahmad nominated Kissinger, then serving as President Richard Nixon's national security advisor, as their target. When inadvertently revealed to federal authorities by Philip Berrigan's wife, who mentioned it in a letter to him while he was still serving time in a federal prison not far from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a draft board raid two years earlier, the plot provided the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover with an opportunity to suppress the "Catholic resistance" for which he seemed to have been longing.

In the sensationalism produced and notoriety granted the defendants, the ensuing conspiracy trial of the Harrisburg Eight was an incident in the history of the repression of antiwar radicals perhaps second only to the conspiracy trials following the Democratic Party's 1968 convention in Chicago. Ahmad's persona added to the public intrigue. Next to his Catholic comrades, Ahmad and his identity as a Pakistani-American scholar of revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency in the Third World made for a peculiar contrast widely noted in the media. After spending fourteen months in legal limbo from the date of their arrests to the jury's verdict, the Eight were acquitted when it became apparent that the prosecution's main witness was a former convict on the Bureau's payroll. (Berrigan and his wife were convicted for mail fraud.) Hoover died four weeks later.¹ Coinciding with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers and subsequent federal trials involving Daniel Ellsberg and the New York Times, the government's case succumbed to a growing popular awareness of official malfeasance at the highest levels of the federal government.

Not surprisingly, the Kissinger kidnapping plot has been overlooked in recent histories of 1960s radicalism. As only one event in the history of a large and diverse antiwar movement, it has receded from view in both the annals of academic scholarship and popular historical memory. At the same time, radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Weathermen have attracted increasing public interest and scholarly scrutiny.² In the case of the latter, new monographs, an anthology of Weathermen writings, autobiographies, and a popular documentary all explore the group's rise and fall and its meaning in the history of the sixties and American radicalism.³ This new work is part of a larger effort to revise older narratives about the American New Left, mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s, which established an interpretive framework characterized by John McMillian as the "New Left consensus."⁴ New Left consensus narratives employed a framework of declension to explain the apparently tragic trajectory of the white New Left and its allegedly representative organizational expression, Students for a Democratic Society. SDS, it is argued, based in an interracial civil rights movement, student rights agitation, and a politics of participatory democracy, imploded in the late 1960s, the casualty of a volatile mixture of internal political factionalism, government repression, and the ascension of increasingly militant and dogmatic factions that "descended into violence." These developments, it is claimed, caused the American New Left to diverge from its earlier nonviolent and vaguely liberal, "radical liberal," or social democratic traditions and values. As historian Van Gosse has observed, in these narratives this movement's descent into violence is perceived as "a grievous and willful error" that "defines the closure or 'death'" of the New Left in the United States as a whole.⁵

In contrast, revision...