Kissenger's conversationsTIME AND again, people with political power do things that are shameful, foolish, or criminal and then try to cover them up. The corrective is always the same -- to demand that the stewards of government allow their employers, the American people, to know what is being done in their name.
The folly of official secrecy has been laid bare recently in the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and Richard Clarke's testimony about the Bush administration's inattention to the threat from Al Qaeda before Sept. 11. In its zeal for secrecy, the Bush administration recalls the paranoid style of Richard Nixon's White House. So this week's release of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's phone conversations from the period between 1969 and 1974 -- coinciding with a contemporary crisis of confidence in government -- underlines our unchanging need for accountability. Readers of these transcripts might be tempted to regard Kissinger; his aide, General Alexander Haig; his frequent interlocutor, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin; and Nixon himself as comic characters like those in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." But there is nothing funny about Nixon raging to Kissinger in December 1970 about the bombing of Cambodia. "I want them to hit everything," Nixon rants. "I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out here and let's start giving them a little shock. There must be something we can do." The bombing was illegal; it killed Cambodian peasants with no connection to the Vietnam War, it had no effect on North Vietnamese forces, and it helped set in motion events that would lead to the Khmer Rouge's calamitous 1975 takeover of Cambodia. Five minutes later Haig is on the phone laughing at Nixon's military notions. According to the transcripts, Kissinger says: "Now hold on to your hat" and declines Nixon's demand to make an inventory of World War II prop planes that can be mustered for the Cambodia bombing campaign. The Nixon in these transcripts is manifestly unfit to have at his disposal the tremendous powers of the presidency. He was drunk at inopportune times. He was given to irrational tantrums. And it was not out of character for Nixon to remark, after saying he wanted to keep the Vietnamese enemy off balance: "Right now we have another enemy here to fight, and that is a group of legislators who will not support us."
Kissinger fought a long legal battle to keep the transcripts at the Library of Congress sealed as his private property. It is good for the country that he finally lost that battle to the public interest group the National Security Archive. Nothing could be more therapeutic for the body politic than to be reminded that wielders of great power operating behind a curtain of secrecy can do great harm. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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