Gary J. Bass is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.

Can we please stop already with the tributes to Henry Kissinger? As more and more material gets declassified, there are periodic exposures of his uglier deeds. Walter Isaacson’s biography showed in detail how Kissinger had the FBI put wiretaps on journalists and government officials, including some of his own top staffers. A couple of years ago, it was revealed that back in 1975, while discussing how the Khmer Rouge had killed tens of thousands, he told Thailand’s foreign minister, “You should also tell the Cambodians”—the Khmer Rouge—“that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.” More recently, an Oval Office tape was released that captured Kissinger in 1973 saying, “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

And yet Kissinger continues to be publicly lionized in some circles. After his remarkably successful decades-long marketing campaign, he can still call upon an impressive array of friends and cronies to promote him, give him fancy awards or explicitly exonerate him in the press. Last June, at his gala black-tie 90th birthday party at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, the guests included Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Barbara Walters, Tina Brown and hundreds more. Secretary of State John Kerry hailed him as an “indispensable statesman,” while Senator John McCain told a reporter, “I know of no individual who is more respected in the world than Henry Kissinger.”


Just this week, Kissinger will be speaking at the Center for the National Interest (CNI), a Washington think tank dedicated to realism and therefore regular encomiums to its most famous practitioner. Once again, he is more likely to be acclaimed than to face serious questions about, for instance, the 1972 “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi and Haiphong or the civilian death toll from the massive bombing of Cambodia.

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Of all the incidents in Kissinger’s dark past, one of the least defensible must be his and President Richard Nixon’s staunch support of Pakistan’s military dictatorship while it carried out a bloody crackdown on its restive Bengali population in 1971. As Nixon's national security adviser, Kissinger stood behind Pakistan—a Cold War ally that prized its close military and diplomatic relationship with the United States—even as it swept away the results of a democratic election, killed horrific numbers of Bengalis and targeted the Hindu minority among Bengalis. He reserved his vitriol for India. And he trashed the career of Archer Blood, the brave U.S. consul general in Dhaka who, while witnessing and documenting the onslaught against the Bengalis, dissented from the White House’s pro-Pakistan policy. Here is a case where you’d think that even Kissinger’s most ardent defenders might settle for an embarrassed silence.

Not so. Confronted with the facts in my new book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Robert D. Blackwill makes a plea for sympathy—not for the hundreds of thousands of Bengalis killed, nor for the 10 million refugees or the traumatized survivors, but for “those at the top of the U.S. government who have to make momentous decisions.” In an expanded essay in The National Interest (which is published by CNI and whose honorary chairman is Kissinger), Blackwill goes further: “We should be grateful” to Nixon and Kissinger for their actions.

Dec. 8, 1971 Executive Office Building In December 1971, Pakistan and India fought a short but decisive war that would result in the creation of Bangladesh. With Pakistan on the brink of defeat, Kissinger proposed to help Pakistan by deploying a U.S. aircraft carrier group to threaten India, secretly asking China to mass its troops on the Indian border, and illegally allowing Iran and Jordan to send squadrons of U.S.-made warplanes to Pakistan. On Dec. 8—a day after receiving warnings from State Department and Pentagon lawyers that it would be illegal to allow the transfer of the Jordanian and Iranian planes—Nixon and Kissinger, joined by John Mitchell, the attorney general, met in the president’s hideaway office in the Executive Office Building and decided to go ahead. Nixon : ... What I mean is let's do the carrier thing. Let's get assurances to the Jordanians. Let's send a message to the Chinese. Let's send a message to the Russians. And I would tell the people in the State Department not a goddamn thing they don't need to know. Right, John? Mitchell: I would hope so. Kissinger : Except that they have to know of the movement of the Jordanian planes. And I would rather— Mitchell: Well, you've got to give them the party line on that or all a sudden the secretary of state will say that's illegal. Kissinger : I'd rather just have— Nixon : All right. Kissinger : Let Johnson [ presumably U. Alexis Johnson, under secretary of state for political affairs] in on it now. Nixon : All right. Kissinger : To say that if they move them against our law, they are not to have [unclear—sanctions?]. Nixon : That's right. Kissinger : I mean, I've got to tell them that much. Nixon : All right, that's an order. You're goddamn right. Kissinger : OK. Nixon : Is it really so much against our law? Kissinger : What's against our law is not what they do, but our giving them permission. Nixon : Henry, we give the permission privately. Kissinger : That's right. Nixon : Hell, we've done worse.

These apologetics make a revealing case study in how Kissinger’s reputation stays afloat. Rather than grappling with Nixon’s racist contempt for Indians, or Kissinger’s ignorance about South Asia or emotional misjudgments, Blackwill’s ahistorical piece rests on the careful skewing of the record.

When Kissinger’s actions get too indefensible, Blackwill simply ignores them. Take Nixon and Kissinger’s illegal arms transfers to Pakistan during its December 1971 war against India, where Blackwill goes to considerable lengths to overlook what Nixon and Kissinger knew full well: that they were breaking U.S. law. “Is it really so much against our law?” Nixon asked Kissinger, who admitted that it was. Blackwill ignores such evidence from the White House tapes, as well as the warnings of White House staffers and State Department and Pentagon lawyers that such arms transfers were violations of U.S. law. Instead, trying to change the subject, he writes, “Bass expresses indignation at this proposal, suggesting that it was undertaken to assist in the repression of civilians in East Pakistan”—even though these pages in my book actually concentrate on how Nixon and Kissinger broke the law. Blackwill can’t defend Kissinger for breaking U.S. law, but he can’t criticize Kissinger either, so he just pretends it never happened.

Blackwill’s method throughout is to avert his gaze from the most important evidence at the highest levels, particularly the White House tapes of Nixon and Kissinger’s most unguarded conversations, and stare selectively instead at a small portion of the less revealing stuff: Kissinger’s self-serving memoirs and books, public declarations, big interagency meetings, mid-level statements. This gives a systematic slant to Blackwill’s reading of events, which unsurprisingly validates his own ideological predilections. Anyone wanting the complete story can check out more than 2,600 footnotes in my book (the product of almost four years of comprehensive research in U.S. and Indian archives, untold thousands of declassified pages, and unheard White House tapes), rather than Blackwill’s slipshod little sketch. His real problem is that The Blood Telegram painstakingly documents Nixon and Kissinger’s whole record and draws measured and reasoned conclusions that don’t flatter Kissinger.

While Blackwill—a former senior George W. Bush administration official who is now, aptly enough, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations—wants to believe that Nixon and Kissinger were masters of clear-eyed realpolitik, the White House tapes demonstrate that they were all too often driven by emotion and bias. Don’t take my word for it: At the time, Nixon called Kissinger “emotional” and wondered if he needed psychiatric care; Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman saw him as “overexcited” and “overdepressed about his failures”; George H. W. Bush, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, found him “very excitable, very emotional almost” and “paranoid.”

Blackwill sidesteps my book’s abundant evidence of Oval Office passion and bigotry only by raising the non-issue of profanity, pretending that I am “curiously offended that conversations in the Oval Office are often not the stuff of a church social.” In fact, the candid quotes from Nixon and Kissinger are salient because they are cruel, racist or reckless, not because they are PG-13. (I even point out that Kissinger didn’t swear much, tending toward “balderdash” or “poppycock.”) Indeed, some of Nixon’s harshest utterances about Indians use perfectly printable language: “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do.” Kissinger joked about the massacre of Bengali Hindus, and, his voice dripping with contempt, sneered at Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.” Is Blackwill really untroubled by such statements?

Rather than face the record in The Blood Telegram, Blackwill constructs his own version of the book, relying heavily on weasel words like “implicit,” “implies” or “suggesting” to fashion a caricature replete with shrill arguments that never appear in the actual pages. He somehow accuses me of ignoring the Cold War context, although that is actually one of the book’s primary themes, the subject of countless pages. Where exactly does the book call for, as Blackwill somehow imputes to me, “an all-out private and public human-rights campaign” against Pakistan’s military rulers?

Rather less excitingly, the book concentrates not on hypotheticals, but on the policy options that were actually being debated in 1971: suggesting that Pakistan’s military chiefs respect the basic results of a democratic election, making private complaints about the use of U.S. weaponry to kill civilians, threatening some loss of U.S. military or economic aid and so on—all steps that Kissinger firmly opposed. The best hope for preserving a united Pakistan was cautioning the Pakistani military leadership against opening fire on the Bengalis, but Kissinger refused to do so. He ignored the U.S. government’s regional experts, made no efforts to encourage a political deal among the stakeholders in both wings of Pakistan and hoped for the success of the military onslaught. Here is what I actually wrote, with more nuance than Blackwill dares to admit: “No doubt there were limits to U.S. influence, but Kissinger never explored them.” While Blackwill wants to believe that Kissinger made a wise judgment about the limits of U.S. influence over Pakistan’s generals, the record shows that he underestimated the strength of Bengali nationalism and overestimated the efficacy of the Pakistan army’s violence—in other words, made many of the same analytical errors as the Pakistani military.

From Blackwill’s panegyric, you’d think that only pointy-headed academics would be so naïve as to consider whether the U.S. government should be concerned about massacres committed by an ally in a volatile region. As he intones, “Statesmen have to make such choices; professors do not.” But in fact, many important U.S. officials—including senior White House staffers, high-ranked State Department officials, and the Republican ambassador to India—argued for human rights as a crucial element in U.S. foreign policy aimed at winning the Cold War.

The hard decisions for U.S. policymakers came in the aftermath of remarkably free and fair elections in 1970 in downtrodden East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and dominant West Pakistan (today Pakistan), which were won by Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan. After some inconclusive political negotiations, the conservative military elites in West Pakistan, fearful of losing their grip on the country’s east wing, decided on a violent onslaught against the Bengalis in East Pakistan.

In the critical days before the Pakistan army started shooting on March 25, 1971, senior White House and State Department officials correctly warned an unheeding Kissinger that a military crackdown would fail and result in splitting Pakistan in two, hurting U.S. strategic interests. Once the slaughter began, Archer Blood, the top U.S. diplomat in East Pakistan, argued cogently that U.S. callousness was driving Indians and Bengalis toward the Soviet Union.

Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s top White House aide on South Asia, wrote, “Insofar as US interests can be defined simply in terms of a balance of power among states, it would be logical—if a choice were required—for the US to align itself with the 600 million people of India and East Pakistan and to leave the 60 million of West Pakistan in relative geographical isolation.” And Kenneth Keating, a distinguished former Republican senator who served as ambassador to India, expressed outrage over Pakistan’s atrocities while also arguing that the United States should build better relations with India, which was far bigger and stronger than a crumbling Pakistan, and a better asset in the Cold War. Although Blackwill disregards them, Keating and Saunders combined moral concern with Cold War geopolitics in the ways that he purports to want.

This is all particularly odd coming from Blackwill, who served with distinction as George W. Bush’s ambassador to India, but here seems to forget about the strategic importance of the world’s largest democracy. After Nixon and Kissinger sent an aircraft carrier group into the Bay of Bengal to threaten India, U.S.-Indian relations plummeted to their lowest point ever. It has taken decades for those bonds to recover, helped by a major pro-India push by George W. Bush’s administration—one of the biggest diplomatic achievements of that presidency.

Distracting attention from the actual human calamities in Bangladesh, Blackwill conjures an imaginative variety of alternative Cold War disasters that might have happened. His selectivity is no less pronounced here. For instance, while he lauds Kissinger for later pursuing détente with the Soviet Union (fair enough), he omits how an emotional Kissinger rashly risked a dangerous showdown with the Soviet Union in December 1971. With India trouncing Pakistan in a short war, Kissinger secretly pressed China to menacingly move troops to India’s border, as a way of assisting Pakistan. But in turn, Soviet-backed India would have to ask the Soviet Union for help. If that sparked a confrontation between the Soviet Union and China, Kissinger urged Nixon to back China in an escalating crisis. As Nixon grilled Kissinger, “Start lobbing nuclear weapons in, is that what you mean?”

Blackwill focuses obsessively on Pakistan’s role as a secret back channel to China. For him, the China channel serves as a get-out-of-jail card for Kissinger, exculpating him from any criticism for his pro-Pakistan policies. With rather more subtlety than Blackwill can handle, my book argues that those who wish to justifiably celebrate the opening to China—which I call a “momentous achievement” which “would help to end the Vietnam War and win the Cold War itself”—should remember the terrible cost paid by Bengalis and Indians.

But of course, Nixon and Kissinger’s support for Pakistan’s junta long predated the opening to China; Nixon first swooned for the Pakistani military in 1953, as vice president on his first trip to South Asia. Kissinger himself argues that his pro-Pakistan stance was “correct on the merits, above and beyond the China connection.” In June 1971, Nixon privately told Kissinger in the Oval Office, “Look, even apart from the Chinese thing, I wouldn’t do that to help the Indians, the Indians are no goddamn good.” As Winston Lord, Kissinger’s loyal top White House staffer on China, told me, “you already had an American bias toward Pakistan before the opening to China.” He added, “To say we tilted toward Pakistan because of the opening to China is an oversimplification. We might have done that anyway.”

Moreover, Pakistan was not the sole possible channel to China. Although Blackwill pretends that it is only me who talks about the other channels, it is simply a fact that the White House was still seriously weighing several other options in the fateful early months of the Bangladesh crisis. In our interview, Winston Lord emphasized that Pakistan was not the only alternative. Kissinger personally made approaches through the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and a French diplomat. Take the breakthrough message from Mao Zedong inviting an American envoy to Beijing: Romania delivered an almost identical Chinese invitation as the one that came through Pakistan, showing that China was making good use of other channels. When Nixon replied, he sent his message through Romania as well as Pakistan. It was not until late April—a month after Pakistan’s military crackdown started—that the White House shut down its other channels.

Later, after Kissinger’s first secret trip to Beijing in July 1971, the United States and China were communicating directly through Paris or secretly meeting face-to-face in New York, giving Pakistan far less claim on the White House. Blackwill now frets about how Mao Zedong might have responded had the United States made some complaints about Pakistan’s atrocities, but—like Kissinger—fails to notice that China was hesitant in its own support for Pakistan. During the December 1971 war between India and Pakistan, when Kissinger tried to get China to move troops against India, it was China that balked.

Blackwill is at his most woebegone when he tries to show the humanitarian side of Henry Kissinger. To be sure, as my book explains at length, the United States—under pressure from public opinion and Democrats in Congress—did give humanitarian aid to some of the millions of Bengali refugees who fled into India, as Kissinger sought to deprive India of a reason for attacking Pakistan. But Blackwill overlooks the inadequacy of treating the symptom but not the disease.

Instead, he cherry-picks a few of Kissinger’s most charitable statements. He selects some of these from one of Kissinger’s interagency Situation Room meetings in July 1971, during which Kissinger sometimes placated State Department skeptics by acting more moderately than he did in private with Nixon—where real policy got made. Although Blackwill wrongly accuses me of ignoring this particular incident, that is because he overlooked the section of The Blood Telegram where I cover this episode. Similarly, the three other incidents that Blackwill seizes upon as evidence of my bias are all in fact right there in the book.

More importantly, Blackwill fails to note the meager scale of U.S. funding as compared to the magnitude of the human disaster facing India. In June 1971, as desperate Bengalis rushed into India, Kissinger’s own White House staff starkly warned that India would need more than $400 million to look after some six million refugees for a single year—of which the United States had, after a slow start, supplied $70 million. The inevitable result of the global (not just U.S.) failure to help India: refugees dying in droves of cholera and diarrhea in wretched refugee camps in India’s unstable border states. One wonders how they might have responded to Blackwill’s exhortation to be grateful to Kissinger.

It is always uncomfortable to face up to the darker chapters of American history. But those on the receiving end of Kissinger’s foreign policy may find it rather harder to cheer for him. The awful events of 1971 have certainly not been so easily forgotten in South Asia, where many Indians still resent Kissinger’s actions, and Bangladeshis still mourn the slaughter as their country’s foundational trauma. Given how little there is to celebrate about 1971 in that strategic part of a rising Asia, it is all the more remarkable that Kissinger retains his celebrity status here. Perhaps the next time a think tank holds a gala, they could raise a glass to Archer Blood instead.