David Owen assesses a compelling account of an all-important year for Henry Kissinger, reviewing Alistair Horne's new book.
By David Owen
Published: 6:00AM BST 04 Sep 2009
Alistair Horne is a political and military historian who writes with wit and intelligence. Instead of writing a biography of Henry Kissinger, he has focused on 1973, the all-important year in Kissinger’s time in office. He is not, however, a slave to this year and sensibly, in discussing “the opening to China”, spends the first 20 pages describing Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972 and how it had taken three years to set up.
Similarly, he covers the May 1972 summit in Moscow, the first time any US president had visited Russia, and the signing of the ABM Treaty, and only then Kissinger’s talks with Brezhnev in May 1973 followed by Brezhnev’s boisterous visit to the United States in June.
This context is important because it raises the question of whether the Christmas bombing of Vietnam in 1972, and the earlier bombing of Cambodia and Laos, were vital to the Nixon strategy of opening up US relations with China and Russia or whether playing Beijing off against Moscow was the key. There is a case to be made that these were achievable objectives which did not require bombing Vietnam for four more years.
Nixon’s own analysis of Vietnam is summed up in his pep talk in the Pentagon to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 1973 when he explained that Vietnam had been “important not for itself but because of what it demonstrated in terms of support for our friends and allies and in terms of showing our will to our enemies. We had to see it through. I could have ‘bugged out’ free after the ’68 election.”
Horne does not question whether it would have been better for Nixon and Kissinger to do just that, and whether China and Russia contributed far more to Nixon’s landslide victory in November 1972 than what happened in Hanoi.
Instead, he highlights a Vietnam celebration party in 1973, where Nixon made no reference to Kissinger in his speech, and claims that Kissinger made “finally ‘peace with honour’ achievable. Now peace seemed indeed in hand; the prisoners were home; Vietnam could be forgotten. Time to move on.” But there was no honourable peace to celebrate, with or without Watergate.
Kissinger, in October, would have been wise to have turned down the Nobel Peace Prize as his Vietnamese counterpart did. It was dubbed the “Nobel War Prize” by the New York Times, and George Ball joked “the Norwegians must have a sense of humour”. Eighteen months later, on April 30 1975, the North overwhelmed South Vietnam. Kissinger had no alternative but to return the Gold Medal.
The author’s expertise is evident in the chapter entitled “A Dagger Pointing at the Heart of Antarctica”. It is controversial for it takes on the traditional view of the international Left who hold Kissinger personally responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile, in a brutal coup by General Augustus Pinochet in September 1973.
Horne draws not only on documents and investigations but also on his own book Small Earthquake in Chile. He also recalls the experience of visiting the mysterious revolutionary figure Comandante Pepe up in the wild Andean foothills. He showed him the cover of his book on the Paris Commune of 1871 to prove that he was not unsympathetic to Marxism.
The Yom Kippur war in the Middle East is brilliantly analysed in four chapters. I approached them wondering whether anything new could be written on the subject. But in many recent conversations with Kissinger and others closely involved, and relying on new unclassified information, some of it from Russia, the fascinating story is retold with vigour and shrewdness.
Here Kissinger deserves full credit, both because he is by then the Secretary of State, not just National Security Adviser, and because Nixon is weighed down by the resignation of his Vice-President Spiro Agnew and the build up in the summer of 1974 to his resignation for covering up the criminal Watergate break-in.
Though Kissinger does not confirm that Nixon was upstairs in a drunken stupor in the White House while US forces were put on high alert, warning off the Soviet Union from any military intervention, the author leaves one in no doubt that this was Nixon’s condition.
Horne finally concludes that Kissinger might have been more deserving of Nobel recognition for his Middle East diplomacy and argues that he was one of the few statesmen in office to do something positive to break the logjam of the Cold War and continues to have influence with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. These are statements with which I fully concur.
Lord Owen was foreign secretary in James Callaghan’s Labour government, 1977-79
Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year
by Alistair Horne
480pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
Buy now for £18 (plus £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books
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