Book Review
 
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide by Gary J. Bass (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2013)
 
Jeremy Paxman once asked Henry Kissinger, ‘When you heard you had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, did you feel a fraud?’ The great man’s reply was brusque, and after one more Paxman-style question in the same vein he walked out of the studio. But Paxman had a point.
 
Since the publication in 2001 of Christopher Hitchens’ book The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso Books), a picture has emerged of Kissinger not as a peacemaker but as a war criminal. Hitchens’ case is closely argued. He shows pretty conclusively that Kissinger, as National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon, was heavily involved in the 1973 coup in Chile which brought down the democratic government of Salvador Allende and replaced it with the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet - a regime that was to become infamous for arbitrary arrests, torture and summary executions. Equally convincingly, Hitchens exposes Kissinger’s role in prolonging the Vietnam War. In 1968, during Nixon’s presidential campaign, Kissinger and Nixon used secret agents to sabotage the Paris peace talks, promising the Vietnamese a better deal under Nixon’s presidency. The Vietnamese negotiators withdrew from the talks. Instead of a better deal, Indo-China suffered a six-year extension of the war, with massive bombing raids on Laos and Cambodia and an estimated death toll of 950,000. Kissinger’s Peace Prize was awarded for negotiating the long overdue withdrawal of American troops; his Vietnamese counterpart Li Duc Tho declined the Prize, for reasons we can readily imagine.
 
Now, with Gary J. Bass’s book we have an exhaustively researched chronicle of yet another sorry episode in the career of this great player of war-games. The ‘forgotten genocide’ of the title refers to the 1971 crisis in East Bengal, then part of Pakistan but subsequently to become Bangladesh. Following a general election in which East Bengalis voted overwhelmingly for the Awami League, a moderate centre-left party dedicated to Bangladeshi independence, the Pakistani military seized power and began a campaign of terror. Their forces went from district to district, village to village, killing several hundred thousand unarmed civilians and forcing many more to flee to India. The Pakistani army was equipped with American weaponry, which Nixon and Kissinger continued to supply as the massacres were going on.
 
Archer K. Blood, US consul in East Bengal, sent report after report to Washington, describing events in unsparing detail: corpses rotting in the streets, the deaths of children, the summary executions of academics at the University of Dhaka. Kissinger made sure these reports were suppressed, until Blood, exhausted and frustrated, sent a ‘Telegram of Dissent’ - the term used for an official communication in which an American diplomat registers fundamental opposition to the foreign policies of his government. It was career suicide. Blood was dismissed from the diplomatic service.
 
What Bass does in his book is remarkable. The nineteen main chapters, plus the Epilogue, are virtually a day-by-day account of events in India, East Bengal and Washington, with Kissinger and Nixon’s political manoeuvres receiving perhaps the closest attention. Details are drawn from reliable witnesses and - most revealingly - from Nixon’s famous ‘White House tapes’. There is political argument, Hitchens-style but somewhat more detached, in the Preface; but the rest of the book is straight narrative history. To say it reads like a novel would be misleading, but it’s a true narrative that has something in common with a good novel. The characters of Kissinger, Nixon, Indira Gandhi, Archer Blood and others develop gradually as events unfold. And it’s a page-turner.
 
We discover Nixon’s often appalling coarseness. For Nixon, political allegiance easily merges into the crudest prejudice. Pakistan is a ‘friendly’ state, allied to the US in the Cold War; non-aligned India - preparing to intervene to stop the killings - is seen as an enemy. Thus the Indians are ‘bastards’. Hearing that the population of India was a few millions more than he had thought: ‘Why anybody would want to reproduce in that goddam place I don’t know’. And as if this wasn’t gross enough, he adds: ‘What they need is a mass famine’. Nixon complains about the courtesy shown to Indira Gandhi on her visit to Washington: ‘We really slobbered over the old witch’.
 
The character of Henry Kissinger is more complex, and its multiple strands emerge at key points in the narrative. We discover his talent for manipulation, especially his ability to work on the President. Finding Nixon in an angry mood, he fans the flames by telling him something he doesn’t want to hear, then nudges him towards making a decision that suits Kissinger’s purposes.
 
His anti-democratic, authoritarian tendencies are unmistakeable. He strives to keep news from East Bengal out of the media, and fumes at journalists such as Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times who publish the truth regardless. He wants to control and censor the media, but fortunately American democracy does not allow him to do so. He sees adverse public opinion as a threat. As liberal congressmen and Senators try to enact legislation to stop arms shipments to the murderous Pakistani regime, Kissinger seeks ways to supply them illegally through Iran and Jordan. At one point, his anger once again stoked up by Kissinger, Nixon exclaims: ‘The hell with the damn Congress!’
 
There are other moments, very different from these. We are shown the plight of the East Bengali refugees, safe for the time being in Indian West Bengal, but desperately in need of food and shelter. In a chapter sub-section titled ‘Rock and Roll’, Bass describes the Concert for Bangladesh, organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. It was the first rock event for humanitarian relief, a model for Live Aid and many other shows. It drew forty thousand people. Its climax was a performance that, in its own way, deserves to be called historic. Harrison introduced a surprise guest, who had not been billed to appear. ‘I’d like to bring out a friend of us all,’ he said. ‘Mr Bob Dylan’. Dylan’s performance was electrifying. As he sang ‘How many deaths will it take till he knows/ Too many people have died?’ there was a breathtaking moment of recognition that the words of this already famous song had taken on a new meaning.
 
This book is narrative history of the first order. At its best, and we find the best of it in every chapter, it offers high definition exposure of the machinations of political leaders - including, at times, Mrs Gandhi. And equally it offers insight into the courage of the oppressed and the commitment of ordinary Americans and others who refuse to acquiesce in such injustice.
 
It could be said that readers are left in no doubt as to what sort of conclusions to draw. But Bass - rightly in my view - uses the Preface to point us in the right direction. Often, he argues, US presidents can be accused of ‘uncaring disengagement’, standing idly by as atrocities happen - as Bill Clinton did during the Rwanda massacres. But the East Bengal genocide is different: ‘The White House was actively and knowingly supporting a murderous regime.’ Bass goes on: ‘This stands as one of the worst moments of moral blindness in US foreign policy’. Though Nixon and Kissinger clearly ‘bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis’, the truth has, up to now, been little known due to the ‘farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies’ vigorously promoted by both men in interviews and numerous volumes of memoirs.
 
Nixon is no longer with us, but Kissinger, at 90, is still in possession of all his faculties. He will not be prosecuted for war crimes or aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, because the US has exempted itself from the international laws that brought other human rights abusers, such as Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor, to account. But a book like this helps to ensure that the evidence is laid before the public, at least informally if not through the judicial process. Perhaps the Nobel committee should read Gary Bass and consider issuing an apology, or even withdrawing Kissinger’s Peace Prize, seeing it as an insult to the memory of such honourable laureates as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.