Henry Kissinger was an extremely influential figure in world politics in the 1970s. Photo: Wally McNamee/Corbis Historical
Henry Kissinger was one of the most brilliant, controversial and effective statesmen of the 20th and early 21st centuries. I have been fortunate to have had an “interesting” relationship with him over the past four decades. We started on opposite sides and eventually made peace.
In 1979, I published an insightful book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. It was about the role of the United States in the Cambodian War from 1970 to 1975, which ended with the victory of the terrible communist Khmer Rouge, who then killed more than two million of Cambodia's seven million inhabitants.
My Thesis was that Nixon and Kissinger, his closest foreign policy adviser, mishandled Cambodia while trying to get the US out of the Vietnam War. In particular, they carried out massive bombings of Cambodia, which contributed to the destruction of traditional Cambodian society and helped the Khmer Rouge to win.
My book is based on hundreds of interviews, mostly in the US, and extensive use of the US Freedom of Information Act, which has recently been tightened.
Kissinger served as national security adviser and then secretary of state under President Nixon in the 1970s during the Vietnam and Cambodia conflicts. Photo: Nixon Library/via Reuters
During the writing of the book, I wrote to Kissinger many times asking for an interview, but my request was always refused. It was a mistake. If he had agreed, I would obviously have had to include all of his responses to my criticisms in my book. This would weaken my arguments, but would make the book more balanced.
Following publication, his top aide, Peter Rodman, requested from the Pentagon all the “Shawcross Papers,” as he called them, which I received and published a 16-page indictment in the American Spectator alleging that I had falsified evidence. In his words, the interlude was a “joke,” “obscene,” and a “fraud.”
I responded strongly and included the entire exchange in subsequent paperback editions of Sideshow so that readers could examine the arguments for themselves.
Rodman concluded his criticism in a way that especially resonated with me as an Englishman: “If it weren't for the power of the United States, Mr. Shawcross would have grown up speaking German.”
He was absolutely right – and I really didn't like the fact that my book was used by the far left as evidence that Kissinger and the US itself were war criminals. I, on the contrary, believe that America has made many mistakes, but without the power of the United States in the 20th century, “Western civilization” as we know it would not have survived.
After our hostile exchanges in print, Rodman and I became friends, and we surprised a lot of people when we wrote a New York Times op-ed together supporting General Petraeus' 2007 troop surge in Iraq. I was saddened when Rodman died prematurely in 2008 and went to Washington to honor his memory. service.
In 2018, Kissinger was verbally attacked at New York University when he tried to hold a public conversation with Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England. Some 30 student groups and Amnesty International condemned him as “the morally reprehensible poster child of American militarism and imperialism.”
“You have blood on your hands”; “You have committed crimes against Chile, against Argentina, against Cambodia, against Vietnam”; “You are a war criminal and deserve to rot,” were some of the insults hurled at him as handcuffs dangled below his face. This kind of abuse was not unusual, and I was well aware that my book was at least partly to blame.
In 2018, Kissinger was called a “war criminal”; during a protest by student groups and Amnesty International, citing his influence on the US bombing of Cambodia. Photo: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group Editorial
A few years ago I saw Kissinger at an event in London. He stopped to talk to me as his formidable wife Nancy walked by. He said, “Ah, Mr. Shawcross, you see, for me it's the Thirty Years' War, but for Nancy it will always be the Hundred Years' War.”
I suspect Mrs. Kissinger thought I had turned political differences over Cambodia into a long-running moral crusade that has fueled the “war criminal” accusations that have been leveled ever since. That wasn't my intention, but I can't blame her. I deeply regret the tone of the angry anti-American and anti-Kissinger debate that my book helped to spark.
In the interest of accuracy, I should report that recent studies by researchers in rural Cambodia suggest that civilian casualties from US airstrikes ordered by Nixon and Kissinger may have been significantly less than was believed in the 1970s. If this had turned out to be true and if I had known it at the time, my Sideshow arguments would have been different.
In 2016, I had my first private conversation with Kissinger. As we sat down, he said, “Forty years ago we had a serious disagreement. I have read what you have since written and agree with it. Let's discuss these issues rather than our long-standing differences.”
I thought that was extremely kind. I am grateful for the many conversations and insights he has given me since then.
William Shawcross's book Sideshow was first published published in 1979. Photo: David Rose
We didn't agree on everything, but I knew full well that he was an extraordinary person who deserved respect. He came to the United States in 1938 as a 15-year-old exile from Nazi Germany and returned there to fight the Nazis as a young soldier in 1944. He wrote to his parents: “I am proud and happy that I can enroll here as a free American soldier.”
After serving as Nixon's secretary of state, nine presidents and many other world leaders sought his advice—because he had an unparalleled understanding of history and diplomacy. After the fight against fascism, he always believed that the United States was the last hope of the world. He was right.
Perhaps especially relevant at this moment was his decisive role in ensuring peace between Israel and Egypt after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Without him, it seems unlikely that any such peace would have been achieved at that time.< /p>
There are enemies of civilization – Hitler, the Khmer Rouge, and now Hamas and other Islamist terrorists – who cannot be appeased. Kissinger, a great diplomat, always understood that such groups had to be fought and defeated, and that always involved painful choices.
As his biographer Robert Kaplan explained on Thursday, Kissinger's views were uncomfortable and easily caricatured. , but “he thought more deeply about morality than many self-proclaimed moralists.”
William Shawcross first had a private conversation with Kissinger in 2015, in which the statesman told him he agreed with much of what he had written over the years. Photo: David Howells
For Kissinger, morality and power could never be separated. He believed that order was more important than freedom, “since without order there is no freedom for anyone, [and] the purpose of politics is to reconcile the just with the possible.”
It is difficult to argue with this. With. At the same time, I think we should remember Reinhold Niebuhr's warning that sometimes “we have taken, and must continue to take, morally dangerous actions in order to preserve our civilization.”
Israel may well argue that they are doing just that in the face of a horrific attack by Hamas, a murderous terrorist group whose covenant demands that Israel be destroyed by jihad and Muslims kill all Jews “hiding behind rocks and trees.” All Jews.
No one could give Israel better advice on how to combat such evil today than Henry Kissinger.
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