Kissinger Made the Biggest Mistakes in US History

By JOEL D. JOSEPH

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was one of the biggest failures in US history. His actions as Secretary of State undermined the strength of the United States and violated the laws of this nation. Kissinger made China the world power that it is today. In 1972 China was a weak agricultural nation with 9% of the GDP of the United States. Now China rivals the US in economic and military power. In 1972 we did not trade with China. By opening the door to Chinese trade, China, with its cheap labor, has transferred wealth from America’s middle class to China. By eliminating five million manufacturing jobs from us, China hollowed out American society. We were told that trading with China would make China more democratic—that was the big lie. China is more autocratic than ever, and more powerful than ever.

Henry Kissinger threated to sue me in 1992. I was publisher of “The Men We Left Behind: Henry Kissinger, the Politics of Deceit and the Tragic Fate of POWs After the Vietnam War,” by Mark Sauter and Jim Sanders. Before the book was published, I sent Secretary Kissinger a copy of the book and asked if he disputed any of the factual material in it. Kissinger, without specifying his objections, said that if I published the book that he would file suit. I published that book, it received rave reviews and Secretary Kissinger did not file suit. The main thrust of the book claims that Kissinger knowingly left American POWs behind in Vietnam.

The full tragedy of the POW-MIA cover-up was revealed in the book. This exposed details that the Senate Committee left buried in the rubble of the investigation: the Nixon Administration knowingly abandoned American POWs, Dick Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush had all played roles in hiding the truth.

Despite countless denials by American officials, the authors provide new evidence that Vietnam War MIAs were smuggled out of the Asian jungles and taken to live out their lives in Siberian exile in Russia.

In 1991, the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs heard from more than 60 witnesses and released reams of documents, many of them had been previously classified as top secret. This is where Henry Kissinger comes in. As President Nixon’s secret negotiator, Kissinger was the chief architect of America’s most controversial peace agreement, the one that ended the Vietnam War.

Since that agreement was signed in January 1973, the German-born immigrant has never ceased being the villain for critics, both on the right and on the left. Many thought that Kissinger sold out America and its fighting men in the field. For Kissinger, the proud winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for the Vietnam accord, this was too much to bear.

Senator John Kerry, undeterred, shot back that it wasn’t his committee, but two members of the Nixon administration, former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, who made the most damning accusations against their former colleagues. Both men testified before Kerry’s committee that top Nixon administration officials, including Henry Kissinger, had strong reason to believe, if not hard evidence, that American prisoners were left behind in Laos and probably Vietnam in 1973.

The committee based its conclusions on these indicators:

• Intelligence reports of Americans known to be held in captivity before the repatriation but were not among the 591 returnees.

• Claims until recently by officials of the Pathet Lao, the Hanoi-linked communist rulers of Laos, that they were holding American prisoners.

• A Pentagon estimate before repatriation that 40 Americans were held in Laos. Twelve were returned.

• The debriefing of returnees, who identified more than 70 fellow prisoners who were not repatriated.

The Senate report laid much of the blame for the claimed abandonment of POWs on former President Nixon, who signed the peace treaty that ended the U.S. involvement in the war and led to the return of the 591 American prisoners. Among these were Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was on the Senate panel.

The report notes found that Nixon was told by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that U.S. intelligence officers believed the list of American POWs provided by Laos shortly before the prisoner exchange was incomplete, but ordered the POW swap to go ahead anyway.

For the first time in the history of the Peace Prize, two members resigned from the Nobel Committee in protest. Tho, Vietnam’s leader, rejected the award, telling Kissinger that peace had not been restored in South Vietnam. Kissinger wrote to the Nobel Committee that he accepted the award “with humility,” and donated the entire proceeds to the children of American service members killed or missing in action in Indochina. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Kissinger attempted to return the Nobel Peace Prize.

Kissinger’s dirty work went far beyond Southeast Asia. Along with Nixon, he backed the brutal effort of the military government of the former West Pakistan to suppress Bengali nationalists in the former East Pakistan, in what is now Bangladesh. A study estimated the death toll in that conflict at 269,000 people, with millions of refugees pushed into neighboring India. Writing for The Atlantic, the historian Gary J. Bass wrote that Kissinger ignored a congressional prohibition against sending arms to Pakistan. Kissinger brushed aside warnings from White House aides and lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon that it would be illegal to transfer weapons to Pakistan. In 1971, with Attorney General John Mitchell present, Nixon asked Kissinger, “Is it really so much against our law?” Kissinger admitted that it was. Not bothering to concoct a legal theory about executive power, Nixon and Kissinger simply went ahead and did it anyway. “Hell,” Nixon said, “we’ve done worse.”

Joel D. Joseph is a lawyer, economist and author of 15 books, including “Black Mondays: Worst Decisions of the Supreme Court” and “Inequality in America: 10 Causes and 10 Cures.” Email joeldjoseph@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2024

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