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FEED: For someone who hasn't read your piece in Harpers, can you point to
something Kissinger did that sums up your case against him? What's most
egregious?
HITCHENS: Well, I think that his very intimate micromanaging of the plan to
kill General Rene Schneider in Chile is what, from a legal point of view, you
could say is the best case. Here's a guy who, in a very squalid and sadistic
manner, has taken the life of an honorable conservative in another country
with which the United States had no quarrel. And I think in a way that's
still the most shocking single incidence.
FEED: Is it realistic to think that he could actually wind up in the dock for
it?
HITCHENS: Well, he'll suffer some inconvenience for it now that all the facts
are in. He'll have to. But I can tell you another thing relevant to this --
he won't suffer any inconvenience in his own mind. If he read that record, I
don't think that it would make him feel queasy. He might feel insulted or
annoyed that I brought it up. But he wouldn't think, "Gee, did I really do
that?"
But it's also rather a micro case in some ways. The macro thing definitely
would be his participation in the undermining of the elections of '68 with
the understanding that this was renewing the mortgage on a war that he knew
was lost. At the very least was lost. And in both cases for short-term
personal gain.
FEED: But would there be strong grounds for a legal case?
HITCHENS: Yeah. The Logan Act [which prohibits Americans from conducting
private diplomacy with a foreign country] would be the first thing. It's
illegal to do that under the Logan Act. I don't know what the statute of
limitations is there, but I'm sure an action could lie under that.
FEED: Given what you've said about how people don't want to hear that they've
been duped, do you think there's popular support for such a case?
HITCHENS: There's duping and there's duping. Some people do the duping to
themselves. They say things like, "Well, he brought down taxes, even if he
was a thief." But in the case of the '68 events, they simply didn't know.
That gang -- the Nixon-Mitchell-Agnew-Kissinger gang -- flattered the
American people in this way: They never told them the truth. They fed them a
fantastic diet of lies. It is a compliment to the American public that it was
never believed of them by their political-criminal leadership that if they
knew the truth, they would accept it. So, in this case they weren't duped.
They just had no idea. The people who did know in the Johnson administration
and in the FBI, and the people who conducted the wire taps and surveillance,
were so horrified by it that they didn't think it could be made public
without creating a semirevolutionary situation.
But among those duped are the families and survivors of 22,500 American
citizens who lost their lives in that period. I would be reluctant to say
these people have been fooled. That would be an insult to them. I think that
it might be too much for them to face. But some of them know very well. Quite
independent of anything I say, that fact demands justice.
FEED: A friend of mine was in the middle of reading your piece, and he said,
"This Hitchens guy. He's pretty biased isn't he?" He said that the tone of it
was so strong, it's as if you weren't giving Kissinger his due.
HITCHENS: I think that's an exceptionally fatuous objection. In the first
place, you have to look at the cover to see that this is the presentation of
the case against Henry Kissinger. To discover this by reading it seems to me
a kind of work of what the Anglicans used to call supererogation In other
words, a surplus of requirements. A more measured response would perhaps be
to say, "Well, he sure is making a case. I wonder what the response to that
would be? I wonder what the reply is?"
And I'm awaiting the answer to that question myself, because I've dangled it
in front of [Kissinger]. We solicited responses from all his usual defenders
and we haven't heard anything yet.
FEED: Like whom?
HITCHENS: We've approached Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft and Peter
Rodman and all those foreign policy types who've worked with Kissinger, or
who generally rise to his defense. They won't come. They won't say. They
won't do anything. And I've also approached the people in the press who I
know are sympathetic to him. People like NPR, who've had me on, have looked
high and low for people to come on and take his side, and so far, no one.
Which I should say is a disappointment to me, because it would be nice to
have something to chew on.
FEED: There's been no response from Kissinger, or Kissinger Associates?
HITCHENS: No, absolutely none whatever. Well, except to our second letter,
which was when they refused to reply to our first one, saying, "We'd like to
ask you some questions." I wrote again and said: "Look, I hope it's not a
matter of money. Perhaps I should be the one to break the ice here. I mean if
you feel that we should offer you a fee, then by all means. We're not rich.
But perhaps we could pay you as much as, say, Ted Koppel would for an average
<I style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Nightline, because I'm sure that in
that time I would be able to ask the main questions I want to ask you, that
you've never been asked by Mr. Koppel."
And that got us a sort of hurt, tear-stained response from William Rodgers,
his deputy, saying, "How dare you?" And I wrote back, saying, "I never knew
before that Kissinger regarded an offer of money as offensive. But I'm
pleased to have this assurance."
FEED: What questions would you ask him?
HITCHENS: I would ask: "When you decided to commission and pay for and arm
the murders of General Schneider, did you feel you needed congressional
authorization? Did you seek it, and did you feel that you had presidential
authorization?"
"When you were in the room with the generals in Indonesia the day before they
invaded East Timor, what did you say?" He's never been asked that, you know.
It's amazing that -- how many journalists are there in Washington and New
York who specialize in foreign affairs? <I style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"
>A lot. He's never been asked this stuff.
Those are the sorts of questions I would ask. They would not be arm-waving
questions. They'd be forensic, based on what I already know.
Of course, the ideal thing would be if they sued.
FEED: For libel?
HITCHENS: Yeah. But I don't believe for a moment that they will. They
wouldn't be able to endure the discovery phase. They would have to disclose
documents that they must be terrified of disclosing. If you look at those
Chilean documents that we now do have and look at what they admit to, and
then you look at the blacked-out bits, you think, "Well, boy, given what
they've owned up to in the unredacted parts, what the hell could that be?"
It's a consistent thing: Every time documents are disclosed, they only
confirm what you suspected. It never leads you away from the hypothesis that
the existing documents give you. So, the induction from that is that what
they're holding must be very incriminating indeed.
It's also impossible to imagine that Henry Kissinger is sitting on a whole
pile of documents that would clear his name. With fairly high confidence, I'd
certainly challenge him to see me in court.
FEED: A few weeks ago Walter Isaacson [the editor of <I
style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Time magazine and author of <I
style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Kissinger: A Biography] spoke at
Columbia's Journalism School, and he said, "You know everyone loves Hitchens,
but he's a little extreme. He takes things too far."
HITCHENS: I should say I not only think that [Isaacson's] book is good, in
many ways, but I rely on it. But I describe it as overly lenient. And one of
the reasons that I have for that is that I've always thought that the thread
of the Schneider assassination, if you pull it out, it never stops pulling
until the whole thing is unraveled. Walter's book, using almost the same
evidence as I did, managed to come to a conclusion that was completely,
logically, and morally false -- that it's just an episode in the
destabilization of Chile, it isn't really a murder attempt.
Now we know that you can't say that anymore. Last fall we discovered that the
CIA had paid a large sum of money in cash to the killers of Schneider after
they had done the job. That's flat out aiding and abetting, an accomplice, an
accessory -- all of that. It makes nonsense of all the other interpretations.
But Walter somehow managed to guess what was missing, because he's not a
fool, and to make it sound less than it really was. But what he likes to
think is that Kissinger didn't like his book -- and it's certainly not a
toadying book -- but now he's getting attacked from left and right. People
like him love to be able to say that, because it makes them seem that they're
thoughtful, responsible. Well, I'm impatient with that kind of complacency, I
must say.
FEED: When people dismiss your work they say, "Well, he's the same guy who
attacked Mother Theresa." And when the Clinton book came out there were a few
reviews implying that you were sort of poisoned by your hatred of the man, so
you weren't seeing it clearly.
HITCHENS: I think one ought to suspect the motives of people who faced with,
say, a suggestion that Bill Clinton as president was not on the level, that
he was a crook and he used the office principally to enrich himself and his
friends and to commit other offenses, if you take the trouble to make that
case and produce your evidence, there will be those who say, "Let's leave
that for now while we talk about the author of these allegations." It's one
of the things that I look for as a sign that I must be onto something,
because people don't try to change the subject if they're happy to discuss
it. What I've been doing over the last ten years or so is basically trying to
show that American liberalism has become extremely decayed if not corrupt.
They've had to swallow so much bit by bit about Clinton that they of course
had no choice but to try and change the subject.
FEED: I think that confuses a lot of people who follow American politics.
They don't know what to make of someone who attacks Bill Clinton and attacks
people on the right.
HITCHENS: You might say that Kissinger is an attack on the right, but that
wouldn't quite be right, because a lot of conservatives have always disliked
and distrusted him for good reasons. And the second thing is that when I go
out of my way to try and show what the implications are -- if what I say
about Kissinger is true -- I say that the people who have to feel most
embarrassed are the American press and the American human rights community
for deliberately ignoring this or for shielding themselves from its
implications. So, again, this is an attack on the reigning liberal culture.
They're the ones who have actually let him off and flattered him. Of course
it's an attack on the Nixon administration and the crooks who were involved
in that. And the killers, too. It isn't an attack on the political right in
this country in its implications at all.
FEED: Where do you stand politically?
HITCHENS: I don't have any identifiable political allegiance at the moment,
though I'm barely ready even to say that. My political training and
allegiance was with the left, and I'm sure it shows. That's how I learned to
argue and what to look for. But that of course came from the particular left
tradition that was so involved in a lot of argument within the left, when
there was such a thing as an intra-left argument, which there hardly is
anymore.
FEED: I remember Brian Lamb on C-Span used to ask you, "Are you still a
socialist?"
HITCHENS: I was very glad he didn't do that the other day when I went on with
him. He used to begin every time we came on. I knew he hoped that one day I'd
say, "Okay, okay, you win." And I knew that even if that day ever came I
wouldn't be glad that it had. It's a question I'm quite happy to postpone at
the moment. It doesn't condition anything I do anymore. I would certainly say
that.
Matthew Craft is a graduate student at Columbia University. He was a
newspaper reporter for three years and his work has appeared in Counterpunch.
Other articles by Matthew Craft
