FOCUS ON FILM: The Trials of Henry Kissinger

The Trials of Henry Kissinger, in the words of its producers, presents "a case for a case" against the former secretary of state. It charges him with war crimes, but argues that ultimately an international tribunal ought to determine his guilt or innocence. The film soberly documents how he masterminded the covert bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, supported Indonesia's repression of East Timor's Fretilin independence movement, and sanctioned the assassination of Chilean general René Schneider in order to facilitate a coup against president Salvador Allende. If guilty, Kissinger would certainly qualify as a war criminal. Or would he?

While The Trials, by its producers' own admission, does not attempt to present a balanced portrait of its subject, it does reveal a complex man whose actions defy simplistic moral categorization. His character arc corresponds more closely to that of the protagonist in an ancient Greek tragedy than to that of any of the 20th century's leading tyrants. More than murder, Kissinger stands guilty of hubris - a false pride in his intelligence and abilities which led him to transgress the bounds of human propriety. He may have done evil, but, as he perceived it, he did so only in the context of serving the greater good.

Kissinger's personal history helps to account for his motivations. His upbringing in Nazi Germany doubtless instilled in him a profound recognition of the reality of evil. Later, as the appalled world greeted the revelation of the Holocaust with cries of "never again," he - a young Jew - would certainly have joined in. When the threat of communism replaced that of Naziism as Stalin and Mao generated victims in the tens of millions each, Kissinger must have made a moral leap which most men find themselves unwilling to make. He apparently reasoned that violently subduing communist revolutions, whatever the casualties, would spare lives in the end. Different innocent people would die, but fewer innocent people would die. Kissinger thus prepared himself to commit some evil at the time in order to prevent more evil later.

His deeds demand understanding in this context. By bombing Cambodia, he hoped to prevent the conquest of South Vietnam by the North - a conquest that, when it took place, led to the death and displacement of millions of Vietnamese. The subsequent communist takeover of Cambodia left one third of that country's population dead. While Kissinger's intrigues in Indonesia and Chile seem less justifiable, he plausibly still believed that the negative consequences of communist rule in those countries would outweigh those of his own imperialist incursions. Since he succeeded in these latter endeavors, the world can only know the damage he caused, as opposed to the damage he averted.

While noble motivations do not necessarily make for noble acts, Kissinger's moral logic has hypothetical merit. Many ethicists have argued, for example, that Hitler's genocidal chancellorship would offer an ex post facto moral justification for having killed him at a younger age. However, since humans lack exhaustive foreknowledge, they have no adequate basis for "playing God" by imposing the death penalty proactively. Kissinger's decision to usurp this prerogative of deity convicts him of hubris, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as "excessive . . . defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis." Kissinger probably did commit crimes against humanity. His legacy consists in absolute political realism, that brand of calculating amorality that people abhor during peacetime and demand in times of war.

I do not intend the foregoing discussion to excuse Kissinger's ethics or his behavior. I do mean to suggest, however, that Kissinger's distinction from other political leaders lies, not in the nature of his objectives, but only in the extent of the power and authority he wielded in pursuing them. For example, Che Guevara once told an English newspaper that, had he had the choice, he would have launched a nuclear strike against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis; however, his Soviet handlers refused to grant him permission to do so. Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state of the most powerful nation on Earth, serving under a president sympathetic to his ends and means, had unprecedented latitude to use force to shape the world according to his ideology. In fact, in many ways he qualifies as the anti-Guevara: a bourgeois revolutionary who believed that you have to break a few chefs to keep them from making an omelette.

Intriguingly, Kissinger does not necessarily deny the charges which the film levels at him. In his memoirs, he does suggest that certain documents, which will not become public until at least five years after his death, will somehow illuminate his behavior and perhaps even exonerate him. But a statement he makes in the movie proves more telling: "The average person thinks that morality can be applied as directly to the conduct of states to each other as it can to human relations. That is not always the case, because sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils." Kissinger regarded the choice of what he saw as a lesser evil as an act of goodness. Whether this makes him a tragic hero, or simply a tragedy, rests with the world - and perhaps the International Criminal Court - to decide.