Years of Upheaval by Henry Kissinger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The recent death of Henry Kissinger has brought all sorts of writing on his career, and in death the controversy and arguments over his impacts, his actions while in power, and even his actions and writing after leaving office, have been renewed with some level of vigor. I do believe that Kissinger, always looking to be in the limelight, would have been delighted with the attention he has been receiving.

Kissinger was, without question, and by his own admission, someone with a very healthy ego. His memoirs are in three volumes, with this volume (2) coming in at 1214 pages. I have read the first two, and as observed for the first volume this book will not be for everyone. The other similarity to be noted is that Kissinger uses his memoirs to burnish his reputation, and to justify some fairly controversial decisions reached during his tenure. Critics point to this as if it would be unusual for a memoir writer to justify actions taken during his tenure. It must be taken into account but does not take away from the vast historical importance of his writings here.

Volume two begins with the advent of Richard Nixon’s second term. This term, for Nixon, would end in disaster, and that disaster would be a significant factor in Kissinger amassing as much influence and power that he came to have. Kissinger does not ignore the political storm that came to destroy the Nixon Administration in his writings, bemoaning the fact that Nixon’s preoccupation with Watergate, and his diminishing political authority, caused serious problems for him as he tried to maneuver in so many areas of critical foreign policy decision making. Kissinger treats Nixon gently, but in his own way makes clear that Nixon’s effectiveness, and his stability, were clearly at issue as Watergate accelerated.

Many have mocked the three volumes as a testament to Kissinger’s massive ego, and in reading this volume there is no doubt that the twelve hundred pages could have come in a bit lighter. In fairness Kissinger (and Nixon) dealt with some enormous issues over the course of Kissinger’s tenure, and Kissinger deals with these in detail, and I believe contributes greatly to the ultimate historical understanding of some critical events.

Kissinger is the only man to serve jointly as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and will likely be the only man that will ever do so. Nixon’s appointment of him as Secretary starts this volume, and Kissinger gets right into Cambodia, a subject that has engendered massive criticism of his actions to this very day. Kissinger, for all the criticism, lays out the actions undertaken to counter the North Vietnamese intrusion, and semi-occupation, of Cambodia. The Kissinger/Nixon prescription to the North Vietnamese utilization of Cambodia as a safe haven for its troops, and as a transit route for supplying its troops in the South, was to introduce U.S. air power, and eventually troops, into Cambodia. This expansion of the war to Cambodia came with enormous criticism, which Kissinger took on directly.

“The absurd myth by which guilt for abandoning Cambodia has been assured runs like this: Cambodia was a peaceful, happy land until America attacked it. There was no reason for this attack: it was the product of the psychosis of two American leaders determined to act out their own insecurities on the prostrate body of an innocent people. They covertly dislodged the only political leader, Sihanouk, who held the fabric of the country together. Then American bombing turned a group of progressive revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, into demented murderers. By this elaborate hypothesis American actions in 1969 and 1970 are held principally responsible for the genocide carried out by the Cambodian Communist rulers after we left in 1975-two years after all American military actions ceased-as well as for the suffering imposed by the North Vietnamese invasion of 1978.”

“On March 18, 1970, the neutralist chief of state Norodom Sihanouk was deposed by his own government and national assembly. The reason was Cambodian popular outrage at the continued presence of the North Vietnamese occupiers, and Sihanouk’s inability to get them to leave. When Cambodia’s new leadership demanded the departure of the North Vietnamese , the latter responded by a wave of attacks all over eastern Cambodia designed to topple the new government in Phnom Penh- a month before the U.S.-South Vietnamese “incursion” into the sanctuaries, which lasted eight weeks. It was Hanoi that had spurned our proposal to immediately restore Cambodia’s neutrality, which I made to Le Doc Tho in a secret meeting on April 4, 1970.”

Kissinger, Henry “Years of Upheaval” pg. 336

Kissinger did not directly address whether the United States, also frustrated by Sihanouk’s inability to deal with the North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, had a hand in the Lon Nol coup that deposed Sihanouk. That action, whether encouraged or not, was not the right prescription for Cambodia, and brought what had to be the anticipated military backlash from Hanoi. Kissinger is correct on the facts as he outlines them above, but they are not the only facts to be considered. The U.S. errors in Indochina are too numerous to list here, and Nixon/Kissinger inherited the war, but the American groupthink mindset, and failure to grasp nuance, and the evolving relationship between the North Vietnamese and China, led in some respects to the vast debacle of Cambodia. That viewpoint cannot excuse the cynical and ruthless exploitation of Cambodia by the North Vietnamese.

Kissinger gives us a view of the Chinese perspective of the evolving Cambodian situation, and in so doing makes a stark admission. As China carefully walked the diplomatic tightrope in advance of the ultimate Khmer Rouge victory they gave subtle clues that they were open to something less than a full victory for the communist insurgency. Of course this was due to the Chinese aversion to North Vietnamese hegemony in Indochina. Kissinger acknowledged that a true master of diplomacy, Zhou Enlai, had left the diplomatic clues of potential convergence of Chinese and American interests in Cambodia, but that the American side (read him) had failed to appreciate or understand those clues, which were couched in denunciations of U.S. actions.

“Zhou Enlai tried to cut through these perplexities-at first a bit too obliquely for us to grasp.”

Kissinger, Henry “Years of Upheaval” pg. 349

The story did not end well for Cambodia, and eventually for Zhou as well. Kissinger believes, likely correctly, that the Zhou diplomatic play, which ended up not working for either the U.S. or China, was the ultimate cause of the downfall of Premier Zhou Enlai in China. Kissinger blamed the inability of the U.S. to hold up its end of the bargain, by maintaining military pressure on the Khmer Rouge, for the ultimate failure. This he attributed to Congressional action prohibiting financial support for this pressure.

China, North Vietnam, and Cambodia. Enough to fill the plate of any diplomat. Kissinger was dealing with the opening to China, detente and arms control with the Soviet Union, a very tenuous relationship with our European allies, “The Year of Europe” initiative, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile (for which he is vilified strenuously today) and of course a major part of the book, the advent of the Yom Kippur War, and Kissinger’s monumental shuttle efforts that brought disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt, as well as Israel and Syria. Kissinger’s efforts on this issue alone were herculean, and to this day held up as the gold standard in diplomacy. Kissinger’s goals here not only included reaching these stage one disengagements but through them the vast diminishment of Soviet influence in the Middle East. As the Middle East suffers through another breakout of war today and some strains begin to show between U.S. and Israeli viewpoints on what the proper actions should be Kissinger’s experiences dealing with the Israeli leadership are instructive, and show that there has always been a bit of strain at points between the countries. A great additional source of information on this issue is the Martin Indyk book “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy” which also gives us a great vantage point on the true extent of Kissinger’s achievements here.

Kissinger, in all his writings, always left observations that are worth repeating. This book has more than a few:

“One of the arts of diplomacy is to clothe a rejection in the form of an acceptance in principle.”

Kissinger, Henry “Years of Upheaval” pg. 843-844

“The political dilemma of democracy is that the time span needed for solutions to contemporary economic problems is far longer than the than the electoral cycle by which leaders performance is judged at the polls. ……The way is open for demagoguery, political polarization and violence.”

Kissinger, Henry “Years of Upheaval” pg. 886

I offer one last tidbit that displays Kissinger’s rather wry sense of humor, and actually got a laugh from me as I read it. As mentioned above Kissinger, in his Middle East dealings, sought to remove Soviet influence from the region. This effort was not made via a frontal diplomatic assault on the Soviets, but rather through a diplomatic dance that appeared to offer U.S. partnership with the Soviets to achieve a settlement between the parties (the Soviets were the major arms suppliers to Egypt and Syria, and considered to be their diplomatic patrons.) With the Soviets getting a bit uncomfortable with the Kissinger maneuvering and not at all happy at being marginalized through the process Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko paid a visit to discuss these matters with President Nixon. Kissinger’s description:

“The Oval Office meeting was made to order for Nixon’s skills at obfuscation; he was a master of the philosophical explanation that explained nothing but created the impression that he was sharing a confidence with his interlocutor. So Nixon blithely expressed his satisfaction with the diplomatic progress that had been made. The United States had been active because the parties wanted it that way. There was no record that we had discouraged this development, but that did not keep Nixon from avowing his general preference for cooperative endeavors with the USSR. On the other hand, the concrete circumstances differed for each superpower: ‘Some areas we can get into where you can’t. We must consider this.’ In other words Nixon favored superpower cooperation in the Middle East except where it did not serve his purpose. Where and how to work jointly, mused Nixon, was a tactical problem to be solved by Gromyko and me-thus neatly getting himself out of the line of fire. All this was presented in Nixon’s best country-boy manner, as if there had been some terrible misunderstanding about a subject too trivial for him to focus on.”


Kissinger, Henry “Years of Upheaval” pg. 942

Kissinger was a major figure in U.S. diplomatic history, and this second volume of his memoirs, for those interested in history, is well worth the long read. The career of Henry Kissinger provides us with a critical view, for better or worse, of some policy decisions still impacting us to this very day. On to volume 3.

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