Kissinger: The Adventures of Super Kraut
by Charles Ashman
(Lyle Stuart, 1972) out-of-print; available used.

One couldn't wish for a better visual representation of the decline of Henry Kissinger than the cover of Charles Ashman's Super Kraut next to the dust jacket of Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

The first title, published in 1972 by a swinging '70s lawyer at the height of "Henry the K's" influence, knocks off about 40 pounds, and caricatures the then-national security advisor as a cross between Superman and James Bond (or "00Henry"). The latter's cover presents a downcast, wrinkled, tired old man: hair gone white, one upper eyelid visibly drooping below the other. The back of the book, rather than containing the usual quote-whore blurbs or the author's past accomplishments, excerpts this preface: "[Kissinger's] own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven.... In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand."

By "justice," author Christopher Hitchens means an international criminal tribunal. The Trial of Henry Kissinger is meant to serve as a primer on and a "bill of indictment" for the former secretary of state's many alleged crimes and indiscretions. The inquiry sparked by its publication and by the publication of excerpts in Harper's has led to summonses from at least three courts, in Chile, Argentina, and France.

Kissinger fled Paris rather than answer questions. He also recently skipped out on an engagement in Connecticut, where he knew Hitchens would be present (and, one assumes, vocal).

As Charles Ashman's rather feather-headed book demonstrates (once you get past the staccato outbursts that are meant to pass for prose), this concern for secrecy and stealth is hardly a new development on Kissinger's part. As national security advisor, he was simultaneously the talk of the town and shrouded in secrecy; he was often seen, but seldom heard publicly. By claiming the Eisenhower-created "executive privilege," Kissinger managed to avoid talking to Congress. Concern about his German accent and the possible (okay, likely) comparisons to Dr. Strangelove led the White House to muzzle him, severely rationing his public engagements.

All of which suited Kissinger fine. He's not a bad speaker, but he enjoys wielding influence quietly. He appears to distrust the masses. Ashman includes some of Kissinger's past strenuous denials that growing up in Nazi Germany had any influence on his later style: "That part of my childhood is not a key to anything. [The] political percussions of my childhood are not what control my life."

And yet, something had to fuel his insistence on secret negotiations and absolute paranoia of leaks. What better motivation could Kissinger have for his apprehensions than childhood memories of angry Germans kicking in shop windows and tossing him and his fellow Jews out of school? He appears to have picked up an instinctive distrust of the masses.

Kissinger was also remarkable for his chicks, often dubbed "Henry's Girls." At the many parties he attended, he was rarely seen without a well-endowed, impeccably dressed new woman in tow. The tabloids and gossip columnists of the early '70s were forever speculating on when (and with whom) the eligible divorcé would settle down. Candidates included television stars Marlo Thomas and Zsa Zsa Gabor; Jill St. John (one of Frank Sinatra's exes); Judy Brown, star of the X-rated Danish classic Threesome; Playboy model Angel Thomas; Washington doyenne Barbara Howar; Gloria Steinem--though both Steinem and Kissinger strenuously denied it--and too many one-night stands to record.

"Henry" often used his social dalliances with these women as a way to distract the press from his real reason for being in, say, France for secret negotiations with ambassadors from North Vietnam. But there is no question that he enjoyed their company for more than strategic reasons. The hilarious last line of Super Kraut records Kissinger's reaction to an Iranian belly dancer's decision to end her routine in his lap: "We went to Russia to keep the world safe for girls like this."

Both Ashman and Hitchens agree that Kissinger's influence on President Richard Nixon was almost unprecedented. It is rivaled historically only by the power of Woodrow Wilson's wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who may have run the United States government after her husband suffered a debilitating seizure. Hitchens calls the Richard Nixon presidency the "Nixon/ Kissinger Administration" for polemical emphasis, and Ashman calls members of the administration the "Nixingers" because, I'm guessing, he thought it sounded cool. To get the flavor of this relationship, here is an excerpt from Super Kraut describing the typical sporadic cabinet meeting:

"[After all but the President have arrived and been seated, Kissinger enters from the Oval Office and] moves to the place at the left of the President's chair. Nixon opens the meeting by announcing why he has called it and what the specific problem to be decided is. He looks to the left and routinely says, 'Henry, will you present the options for us?' For twenty-five minutes without interruption [Kissinger] states the options in steady, clear, accented terms. Nobody will express his opinions on the options until he gets a tip-off in a phrase, expression, or gesture either by the President or Henry. Nixon will [then] poll the table, but he asks his questions in such a way as to make it perfectly clear what answers he wants."

According to Hitchens, with such great power comes great culpability, as well as liability. Kissinger is blamed for everything from sabotaging the 1968 Johnson-led negotiations between North and South Vietnam--in order to throw the election to Richard Nixon, a political opponent--to initiating the saturation bombing of Cambodia, to plotting the assassination of the somehow still-extant Greek political activist Elias Demetracopoulos. Hitchens claims that he limited himself to "only those Kissengerian offenses that might or should form the basis of a legal prosecution." But it's hard to know how seriously we should take Hitchens.

In the first place, he freely admits to relying on slender, incomplete, and highly controvertible evidence. He tries to turn this into a badge of honor by blaming it on Kissinger's paranoid maneuvering to keep his documents under wraps until his demise. Also, Hitchens condemns the saturation bombing of Cambodia as absolutely inexcusable under any circumstances. He has a point--and a good one--but it is difficult to argue that one regime (Nixon's) should be strung up for it while another (Clinton's) should be encouraged and praised for doing the same thing in Bosnia. In Hitchens' moral universe, the ends justify the means... only if he agrees with the ends.

The third and most substantial problem in this slender volume is that Hitchens' self-professed Marxism corrupts his historical vision. If the cease-fire in 1972 was the same one that was available in 1968, and it resulted in torture, imprisonment, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, then maybe it was not--as he leads his readers to believe--such a good cease-fire in the first place. But that's the one criticism of Kissinger that the supposedly fearless Hitchens would never dare to make.