Kissinger Was Right

  

Kissinger Was Right

Peter Schultz

 

William Colby described his testimony before the Church committee’s hearings on the CIA in 1973 in the following way: “All the questions were on assassinations, and it was like ‘when did you stop beating your wife.’ That was all they wanted to talk about, but I insisted on covering the whole range of covert action in a larger way; otherwise it would have been a disaster…. at the end I got to assassination…. There were attempts against Castro in the early 1960s, but our information was very scarce…. They wanted to know whether we had ever had any of our own agents assassinated, [and] I told them we never do that. I also told them that our policy and orders are very clear: we will have nothing to do with assassinations: Church ended by saying that is not enough. That to be certain we need more than orders. We need to have a law which prohibits assassination in time of peace.” [314]

 

Henry Kissinger responded as follows: “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” [ibid]

 

Sounds shocking but what if Kissinger was right? After all, assassinations are, always, conspiratorial and, so, passing a law prohibiting presidents from ordering assassinations is the equivalent of ordering presidents not to engage in conspiracies. Wouldn’t that be, in fact, “an act of insanity” that could lead to “national humiliations?” That is, aren’t conspiracies necessary in order to avoid national humiliations and are, therefore, normal? Which is to say, as Carl Oglesby put it: “Conspiracies are the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.” And because conspiracies are normal, so too assassinations are normal.

 

But that Kissinger was correct should not be reason to cheer his correctness, which is what many realists do, priding themselves on their hard-headed realism, while affirming the political as the realm of virtue and human greatness. Rather, though, that Kissinger was correct should help us to illuminate the political and alert us to be careful about affirming the political as the realm of virtue and greatness. As Machiavelli pointed out, while people admired Hannibal and his greatness, they failed to see that that greatness was the result of his “inhuman cruelty.” In other words, and this Kissinger and realists do not see so clearly, the political is the realm in which inhuman cruelty reigns supreme. Thus, those, like Kissinger, who affirm the political are often guilty of inhuman cruelty, as Kissinger was in his conspiratorial dealings with Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. So it goes.