Diplomats Of The United States

"Some of you may recollect a little girl with clean and curled hair, starched skirts, ruffles, and bows. That perception was wrong. The reality was a kid in blue jeans and sentimental sneakers, dirty hands, dirty face, usually climbing a tree. .. I never even aspired to be an actress. Even when I was very young, I had three aspirations: to be a surgeon, or an FBI agent, or a pie salesman. .. President Roosevelt patted and squeezed me in 1938. Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon shook my hand, but then I was older. Ford kissed me. Jimmy Carter kissed me in the White House, which means I was even older. And now I am simply female, black, and unemployed."

"I have no trouble being taken seriously as a woman and a diplomat here. My only problems have been with Americans who, in the beginning, refused to believe I had grown up since my movies."

"Politicians are actors too, don't you think?"

"Macho attitudes usually fall victim to hard work, timely humor, and an absence of resentment."

"In Gold’s conservative opinion, Kissinger would not be recalled in history as a Bismarck, Metternich or Castlereagh but as an odious schlump who made war gladly."

"A good liar must have a good memory: Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory. So perhaps some of this hysterical lying is explained by its context—by the need to enlist China’s anti-Soviet instincts. But the total of falsity is so impressive that it suggests something additional, something more like denial or delusion, or even a confession by other means."

"Reporter Nick Turse has revealed unreported mass killings, after examining formerly classified U.S. military documents and traveling to 12 remote Cambodian villages to interview more than 75 witnesses and survivors of the U.S. attacks. With this new piece, Nick Turse also publishes transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls that show his key role in Cambodia, and CIA records connecting Kissinger’s actions to the growth of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the regime that massacred 2 million people from 1975 to 1979."

"I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you're more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish."

"Here we begin to see the outlines of the misconceived lesson that Henry Kissinger appears to have drawn from his study of international relations in the past. Secured by his own bureaucratic devices and habits of mind from having to respond to critics or other branches of government, though he could always get his opinion or policy echoed and supported by a well-placed article or interview or congressman, he indeed related to Richard Nixon much as did Metternich to the Emperor Francis II. An ambitious and intelligent courtier with the ear of an absolute ruler is in a position of unique influence, especially if he carries no responsibility for domestic affairs—this much history does indeed teach us. Moreover, although the courtier runs obvious risks if he incurs the ruler’s wrath, it is the ruler himself who is truly vulnerable in a crisis. The cleverest courtiers—Talleyrand comes to mind—will survive the fall of their masters, with some quick footwork and a recasting of the historical record; and Kissinger was among the cleverest of them all."

"Kissinger, Griffel thought, had “a disdain for anyone on the subcontinent,” and had “the Lawrence of Arabia view of the locals. If they don’t ride horses, they’re no good.” He says, “He’s impressed by Pakistani men in uniform and he doesn’t like shopkeepers."

"A very angry Senator John McCain denounced CODEPINK activists as “low-life scum” for holding up signs reading “Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes” and dangling handcuffs next to Henry Kissinger’s head during a Senate hearing on January 29. McCain called the demonstration “disgraceful, outrageous and despicable,” accused the protesters of “physically intimidating” Kissinger and apologized profusely to his friend for this “deeply troubling incident.” But if Senator McCain was really concerned about physical intimidation, perhaps he should have conjured up the memory of the gentle Chilean singer/songwriter Victor Jara. After Kissinger facilitated the September 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende that brought the ruthless Augusto Pinochet to power, Victor Jara and 5,000 others were rounded up in Chile’s National Stadium. Jara’s hands were smashed and his nails torn off; the sadistic guards then ordered him to play his guitar. Jara was later found dumped on the street, his dead body riddled with gunshot wounds and signs of torture... Rather than calling peaceful protesters “despicable”, perhaps Senator McCain should have used that term to describe Kissinger’s role in the brutal 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which took place just hours after Kissinger and President Ford visited Indonesia. They had given the Indonesian strongman the US green light — and the weapons — for an invasion that led to a 25-year occupation in which over 100,000 soldiers and civilians were killed or starved to death. The UN's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) stated that U.S. "political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation" of East Timor."

"You might think that McCain, who suffered tremendously in Vietnam, might be more sensitive to Kissinger’s role in prolonging that war. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger, along with President Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — killing perhaps one million during this period. He gave the order for the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger is on tape saying, “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” Senator McCain could have...[read] the meticulously researched book by the late writer Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Writing as a prosecutor before an international court of law, Hitchens skewers Kissinger for ordering or sanctioning the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of “unfriendly” politicians and the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers, journalists and clerics who got in his way. He holds Kissinger responsible for war crimes... from the deliberate mass killings of civilian populations in Indochina, to collusion in mass murder and assassination in Bangladesh, the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile, and the incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor. McCain could have also perused the warrant issued by French Judge Roger Le Loire to have Kissinger appear before his court. When the French served Kissinger with summons in 2001 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger fled the country. More indictments followed from Spain, Argentina, Uruguay — even a civil suit in Washington DC."

"Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis. This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations. But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacy—and not by accident. Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administration’s record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since. Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities... To this day, four decades after the massacres, the dead hand of Nixonian cover-up still prevents Americans from knowing the full record. The White House staff routinely sanitized their records of conversations, sometimes at Kissinger’s specific urging. Even now, mildewed and bogus claims of national security remain in place to bleep out particularly embarrassing portions of the White House tapes. Kissinger struck a deal with the Library of Congress that, until five years after his death, blocks researchers from seeing his papers there unless they have his written permission. Even if you could get in, according to the Library of Congress, many of Kissinger’s most important papers are still hidden from daylight by a thicket of high-level classifications, security clearances, and need-to-know permissions... For all the very real flaws of human rights politics, Nixon and Kissinger’s support of a military dictatorship engaged in mass murder is a reminder of what the world can easily look like without any concern for the pain of distant strangers."

"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls & remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg."

"I believe that Henry Kissinger acted immorally in Latin America. He supported a murderer and it’s very conflicted for me that a Jew should be supporting this evilness. For me, this is not the kind of good Jew who inspires better lives for our people. I feel very conflicted about [Kissinger] having so much power, even now."

"Today, America would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the world government."

"Back in 1957, Henry Kissinger—then a brilliant, iconoclastic young Harvard scholar, with his eventual career as cynical political manipulator and, later, as crony capitalist still far in the future—published his doctoral dissertation, A World Restored. One wouldn't think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh is relevant to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger's book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events. [...] It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement--which now in effect controls the administration [...] as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system."

"It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that."

"Accept everything about yourself — I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end — no apologies, no regrets."

"The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally."

"George left us at a moment when our national arguments are too often vindicated by passion rather than reason, by the debasement of the adversary rather than the uplifting of purposes. He also believed that if you were blessed with great gifts, you had a responsibility to apply yourself, and if you cared about your country, you had a duty to defend and improve it. He was skilled in presenting his convictions, but above all practiced the art of making controversy superfluous by encouraging mutual respect. Trust, George used to say, is the coin of the realm."

"Negotiations need to begin in the next two months ... before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it into a war not be about the freedom of Ukraine ... but a new war against Russia itself. ... Parties should be brought to peace talks within the next two months. Ukraine should've been a bridge between Europe and Russia, but now, as the relationships are reshaped, we may enter a space where the dividing line is redrawn and Russia is entirely isolated. ... We are facing a situation now where Russia could alienate itself completely from Europe and seek a permanent alliance elsewhere. This may lead to Cold War-like diplomatic distances, which will set us back decades. We should strive for long-term peace..."

"Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?"

"The military established a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of forcibly removing indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic for the placement of military bases. The peoples of the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific and Puerto Rico's Vieques Island are perhaps the best-known examples, but there were also the Inughuit of Thule, Greenland, and the thousands of Okinawans and Indigenous peoples of Micronesia. During the harsh deportation of the Micronesians in the 1970s, the press took some notice. In response to one reporter's question, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: "There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?" This is a statement of permissive genocide."

"In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role."

"Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response."

"For 400 years, world history was made by Europeans. Many of the great ideas by which we live — constitutional government, freedom of the individual, the ideas of the Enlightenment — originated in Europe and were spread by Europe around the world. Now this region, which was dynamic and built the world, has become too preoccupied with itself. It confines itself basically to the exercise of soft power. At present, no European government has the capacity to ask its people for sacrifices on behalf of foreign policy. Unless Europe can recover some of its historic dynamism, there will be a big hole in the world system as it has until now manifested itself."

"Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them. Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States. The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then."

"American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China's exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China. But it is the heir of the Middle Kingdom tradition, which formally graded all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms; in other words, a kind of cultural universality."

"Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance."

"Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union."

"The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live...In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threaten China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world."

"Few countries in history have started more wars or caused more turmoil than Russia in its eternal quest for security and status. It is also true, however, that at critical junctures Russia has saved the world’s equilibrium from forces that sought to overwhelm it: from the Mongols in the 16th century, from Sweden in the 18th century, from Napoleon in the 19th century, and from Hitler in the 20th century. In the contemporary period, Russia will be important in overcoming radical Islam, partly because it is home to some 20 million Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus and along Russia’s southern border. Russia will also be a factor in the equilibrium of Asia."

"If Putin uses the atomic bomb, Russia will be destroyed."

"The reason that university politics is so vicious is that the stakes are so small."

"Nixon should be told that it is probably an objective of Clifford to depose Thieu before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

"Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized.... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy."

"If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world."

"America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests."

"Military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy."

"Nixon feared for our alliances if America abdicated in Indochina; he was concerned about the impact on Soviet restraint if the United States simply abandoned what four administrations had affirmed, and he believed that a demonstration of American weakness in Asia would destroy the opening to China based in part on America's role in thwarting Soviet moves toward hegemony in Asia. But as he entered office, he found that by the end of the Johnson administration, the goal of victory had been abandoned and a commitment had been made to end the bombing of North Vietnam and to seek a negotiated compromise solution. These objectives had been affirmed by both candidates in the presidential campaign. No significant American political or intellectual leader opposed them. When a negotiated solution proved unattainable, Nixon proceeded unilaterally to implement his concept of an honorable withdrawal."

"I was intellectually convinced that Hanoi would settle only if deprived of all hope of victory by a determined military strategy. But I was emotionally close to many of the more moderate of the protesters who had been my contemporaries at university; therefore I was also the principal advocate in the administration for negotiations for a political solution to give the people of Indochina a genuine opportunity to choose this future. It turned out to be a rough ride, rougher by far than I imagined when I started on the task. Since then, the categories of our national debate on Vietnam have remained largely unchanged, compounded with the passage of time by an amnesia that suppresses events but remembers encrusted hatreds. A balanced judgment on Vietnam continues to elude us - and therefore the ability to draw lessons from a national tragedy which America inflicted on itself."

"If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible."

"Kissinger’s memoirs are a lengthy masterpiece of omission. Although he devotes a long chapter to glossing up his record in South Asia, he says almost nothing about the slaughter of Bengalis, while still insisting that Pakistan’s atrocities were “clearly under its domestic jurisdiction.”... He sanitizes out Nixon’s racial animus toward Indians. No book has done more to bury the memory of the Bengalis."

"Nixon was one of the most gifted of American Presidents, prepared to make tough decisions and courageous in doing so. But he needed solitude for such an act. Face-to-face, Nixon was obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him."

"The Nixon Administration had systematically sought to change the context of the Cold War. This was not because we had become blind to Soviet ideology; rather we had concluded that the Soviets' ideological reach was collapsing. In two generations of Communist history, no Communist Party had ever won a free election. The only allies of the Soviet Union were in Eastern Europe, and they were being held in line by what amounted to Soviet military occupation. Once our opening to China was completed, the Soviet Union faced a coalition of all the industrial nations in the world in tacit alliance with the most populous nation. Sooner or later this equation would work in favor of the democracies, provided they could contain Soviet adventures by deterrence and give the Soviets a chance to reduce confrontation by opportunities for cooperation."

"The great contribution of President Ford was that he managed to strike a balance between the American temptation toward perfectionism and the absolute, and the temptation to abandon everything because one cannot have the perfect and the absolute. He brought about an approach that I believe is essential to the conduct of a continuing foreign policy that works toward the maximum one can achieve but does not go beyond what the American people can sustain or what the international community can comprehend."

"Henry Kissinger. While many in the United States still see Nixon and Ford's former secretary of state as an elder statesman, the rest of the world sees him as a war criminal responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions in Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Argentina, East Timor, and Cambodia, to name a few."

"The domestic divisions that grew out of Vietnam were generally treated in the public discourse as a clash between those who were "for" the war and those who were "against" it. That, however, was not the fundamental issue. Every administration in office during the Vietnam war sought to end it - nearly desperately. The daunting and heartrending question was how to define this goal."

"Both countries [the United States and China] consider themselves exceptional. The United States believes that our exceptionalism entitles us to educate others because if they adopt our principles, the world will be more peaceful. The Chinese do not strive for conversion. In their view, if you do not belong to Chinese culture, you can never become fully Chinese. Thus, they feel America has no moral right to intervene in their domestic affairs. Their analogy to conversion is that the majesty of their performance will so awe other societies that they will follow enough of the Chinese pattern to become cultural and political tributaries."