He Makes War Gladly

Henry Kissinger began his career of human rights abuse in 1968 as a Nixon emissary before Nixon’s election. Johnson who was still President had decided not to run again and Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee. Nixon won the election and Humphrey was out of the picture. During the election campaign Johnson’s emissaries were involved in the Vietnam peace negotiations in Paris. Nixon and his team had decided to subvert the negotiations by spinning the South Vietnamese into believing that they would get a better deal from the Republicans and so right before the election they pulled out of the conference. Thus was Humphrey’s peace plank splintered. Nixon won. As it turned out the war lasted another 4 years and the Vietnamese did not get any better deal than what the Democrats had offered.

The duplicitous Dr. Kissinger made himself welcome on the Johnson negotiating team and was secretly passing information to Nixon and his coterie. Thus they were able to keep the pressure on the South Vietnamese team by staying one step ahead. This may sound incredible but it has all been documented. The tragedy, of course, was that 20,000 more Americans died as well as thousands more of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians.

The secretive Kissinger became Nixon’s National Security Advisor and he alone benefited from all the killing. Nixon, on the other hand, was secretly and illegally, as a private citizen, (he had not been elected as yet), interfering in Executive branch negotiations with the Vietnamese through Kissinger’s presence on the team. So we had Kissinger “leaking” information from the negotiations to Nixon and in effect “playing both ends against the middle”. If Humphrey had won, Kissinger would have been hired as Humphrey’s National Security Advisor.

But the whole point of the duplicity was to defeat Humphrey and elect Nixon by means of an illegal “private foreign policy”. Kissinger played the unscrupulous role of slyly assisting Nixon in getting elected. Nixon had a history of mental illness not widely known. He showed intermittent symptoms of paranoid psychosis and he believed that Jews were plotting against him. Nixon and Kissinger made an infamous team. Nixon was treacherous and Kissinger colluded in mass murder, making him potentially guilty of war crimes.


References:

Heller, Joseph. Good As Gold. 1976
Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. 2001.