Henry Kissinger earned his critics’ scorn — but he didn’t act alone under Nixon | Opinion

Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state who died Wednesday at age 100, left behind a legacy of accomplishment, secrecy and often treachery in his eight years of government service.

While serving Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger was neither the sole policy genius nor the unalloyed war criminal his admirers or detractors made him out to be.

Rather, Kissinger was a skilled implementer of Nixon’s policies, a man of a towering intellect and fragile ego who mastered the arts of flattery and analysis to remain close to the power he craved.

As Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger benefited from the secretive administration Nixon designed. All major decisions flowed through Kissinger at the National Security Council, which centralized policymaking while also keeping most of the administration’s deliberations secret. As a White House employee not subject to Senate confirmation, Kissinger was shielded from having to testify under oath about his activities, unlike other Cabinet officials.

Once in the White House, Kissinger carried out the policy Nixon designed, such as the outreach to communist China. It was Nixon, not Kissinger, who developed the plan to ease the United States out of the Vietnam War and to engage the Soviet Union in the policy that became known as détente.

Kissinger carried out those ideas expertly, as he flattered and cajoled foreign diplomats, starting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. It was Dobrynin whom Kissinger told on Nixon’s orders in February 1969 that the United States had no intention of trying to win the Vietnam War on the battlefield. That disclosure allowed the Soviets to signal to their North Vietnamese allies that the Nixon in the White House was more dovish than the candidate elected president in 1968.

That secrecy, however, generated rivalries in the administration that eventually threatened both Nixon and Kissinger, and led to Nixon’s eventual resignation in August 1974. Alarmed by leaks in the press, Nixon pushed Kissinger to wiretap his own NSC staff to see if they were leaking to the media. Kissinger would later perjure himself during his 1973 Senate confirmation hearings to be secretary of state by claiming he had little to do with the taps.

By then, Kissinger had become a celebrity, a foreign policy wizard lionized by the Eastern establishment. His secret peace talks with North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho would end the Vietnam War and win both men the Nobel Peace Prize.

Labeled war criminal for Chile, Cambodia

Nixon, the architect of those policies, would fume privately that Kissinger received the credit that Nixon believed he deserved.

But it was after Kissinger left office in January 1977 at the end of Ford’s abbreviated presidency that the derision that surrounded Nixon during his political career began to accumulate around Kissinger.

During the last 45 years of his life, Kissinger’s growing legion of critics labeled him as a war criminal for his role in Nixon’s various adventures, such as the subversion of Chile’s democratically elected government, spying on his own staff and disregarding a genocide in Bangladesh, among other missteps.

Nixon, not Kissinger, authorized the bombing of neutral Cambodia that lasted from 1969 to 1973. That bombing destabilized Cambodia’s government and led to the killing of millions of Cambodians by the genocidal Khmer Rouge government in the 1970s.

Nixon, not Kissinger, engineered the outreach to China through the supportive Pakistani government in 1971. In exchange, Nixon turned a blind eye to the Pakistanis’ horrific treatment of the people of what is now called Bangladesh. Kissinger kept silent as thousands of Bangladeshis died.

Alexander Haig ridiculed president, ‘our drunken friend’

For all Kissinger owed Nixon, he often bit the hand that lifted Kissinger to prominence. Alexander Haig, first Kissinger’s deputy and then Nixon’s second chief of staff, routinely ridiculed Nixon behind his back, often referring to the president as “our drunken friend.”

One night during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger and Haig put the nation as nuclear alert while they kept Nixon sleeping upstairs in the White House. Haig and Kissinger then derided Nixon after the president claimed credit for the move during a news conference.

Kissinger’s one singular accomplishment during the Nixon administration came through his shuttle diplomacy among Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Syria following the 1973 war. It was Kissinger who built the peace while Nixon, incapacitated by the growing Watergate scandal, remained in Washington. Reviewing the transcripts of Kissinger’s multiple meetings, it is hard to not be impressed by his skill.

Kissinger rightfully earned the scorn of his legion of critics. He enabled policies that led to the deaths of millions. But he also took the credit and much of the blame for the ideas of his former boss, Richard Nixon.

Ray Locker is the author of two books about the Nixon administration, “ Nixon’s Gamble ” and “ Haig’s Coup ,” and is a writer based in Washington, D.C.