THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER
Rating out of 4 stars: 2.5 Reviewed by Harvey Karten First Run Features Director: Eugene Jarecki Writer: Alex Gibney Cast: Brian Cox (narrator), Christopher Hitchens, William Safire, Gen. Alexander Haig, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Seymour Hersch, Daniel Davidson, Roger Morris, William Shawcross, Walter Isaacson, Michael Tigar, Amy Goodman. Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 9/17/02
In the Nineteenth Century and earlier, or so the myth goes, diplomacy was the art of getting your way by your projection of class your dress, your speech, your rational arguments. You'd sit and have a few drinks with your opponent, show how much culture you share, and bingo: you cut a deal. Not so if we judge by the past hundred years. When two diplomats sit down, neither really gives a fig what the other is wearing, how handsome he is, how rational the arguments. The only questions is: how much power is behind you? Is your country unified behind your position? How many weapons are at your disposal? Or, as one dictator said when told that the Vatican opposed his incursions to the east and west, "Really? How many divisions does the pope have?"
Henry Kissinger, considered by many to be the most prominent diplomat in U.S. history, learned that lesson well. Not particularly handsome, certainly not gifted in his manner of speaking (he has a lifelong rasp and a Germanic accent to his English), Kissinger seems always to have believed that his influence with opponents such as leaders of North Vietnam depends on what's backing him up. In other words, the term of the day was realpolitik: realistic politics. Don't make decisions by moral considerations. Make them by a cool analysis of your chances of winning. This is not to say that he'd refuse to consider the ethics of the Holocaust: quite the contrary. Because of his abhorrence of Hitler's extermination program against the Jews and some others, he had come to believe that a nation must possess the power to defeat evil. To keep world peace, this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize a quarter century ago maintains that you can't appeal to the moral sense of the leadership. You must keep a balance among countries. For example, he'd say that if Iran and Iraq truly believed that neither had an advantage were they to go to war, they would avoid clashing.
Christopher Hitchens,who wrote an article in Harper's Magazine entitled "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" and who is the star, so to speak, of this documentary film by the same name, does not buy Kissinger's view. Hitchens comes across in the film which was shown at the recent Human Right Festival as one who believes that conflicts must be resolved with attention to moral standards. Because he maintains that Kissinger ignored morality in several instances in his diplomatic contacts with North Vietnamese leaders in the early 1970s when acting as President Richard M. Nixon's Assistant for National Security, in his dealing with the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile, in his conduct with Indonesia's apparachiks during that country's invasions of East Timor he holds that HK should be put on trial for war crimes before a universal court in much the way that a court is dealing today with the genocidal Serb, Milosevic.
Benefitting from the declassification of formerly confidential documents and from a reasonable sample of archival material to give balance to the film's talking-heads interviews, director Eugene Jarecki brings Hitchens' article to life, showing Kissinger not only vis-a-vis Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Chile but Kissinger the showman. This is not done pure to entertain but to signal the diplomat's belief that celebrity status could in itself inflate his projection of power therefore we see him in the presence of a few star-struck trophy dates and watch him turn the heads of women who would not give the man a second look were he not among the most powerful Americans of the last century.
Does Jarecki make the point that Kissinger is a war criminal who should be talked about in the same sentence as you'd discuss Pinochet, Milosevic, and (shudder) the arch-evil Nazis who were lined up before a Nuremberg tribunal in the mid-forties? Hardly. The principal error is Christopher Hitchens' implied belief that this one man, Henry Kissinger, is responsible for the death of tens of thousands in Cambodia, for prolonging the war in Vietnam so that Richard Nixon would defeat Hubert Humphrey in an upcoming presidential election, for the assassination of an influential Chilean military general, Rene Schneider, who supported Marxist Allende for the presidency of Chile, for the shipment of defensive weaponry to Suharto in Indonesia for offensive use against a Communist organization in East Timor.
Nonetheless, the film is an important achievement in its exploitation of a paper trail that Kissinger left behind, documents that have now been declassified that indicate that the diplomat and former secretary of state advised his presidential bosses to ignore consider of international morality by, for example, illegally bombing the neutral country of Cambodia when North Vietnamese troops infiltrated into that small but history-rich nation. When we delve into the protracted bombings of Vietnam, though, Jarecki would be hard pressed to prove to an impartial panel that Kissinger was the man responsible for sabotaging the 1969 Paris peace talks (when in fact the breakup of the talks seems to have been the result of South Vietnam leadership's refusal to play ball).
There are a few comic touches, such as the portrayal of a Kissinger lookalike on a Saturday Night Live broadcast delivering some shtick that was not particularly amusing, his portrayal as Superman in a cartoon, and his statement of a pretty interviewer that he was not a swinger but that at certain times he would swing (huh?).
Much of the archival footage is blurred as might be expected from stock up to a half century old. The editing is scattershot, making clarity surely one of the more significant objectives of a documentary as opposed to, say, an experimental bit of fiction--a mixed bag.
Not Rated. Running time: 80 minutes. (C) 2002 by Harvey Karten, harveycritic@cs.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 32849 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 783701 X-RT-TitleID: 1115179 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123 X-RT-RatingText: 2.5/4
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