The desire to do something about Henry Kissinger is, for many, a popular pursuit; for some, an obsession. He is the enemy, for reasons many of them obvious: He is a Harvard intellectual who served Richard Nixon intimately and survived. And of course he was at the right hand of the president for three years of the reviled war in Vietnam.
Resentment is certainly fostered by facial expressions seen as registering Shylockean self-satisfaction, and verbal adroitness that sometimes seems to be bent on squaring circles, a demeanor that enemies will liken to that of the Vicar of Bray, and advocating what they see as Johnnie Cochran explaining the innocence of O.J. Simpson.
The latest expeditionary force against the enemy was initiated by Christopher Hitchens, a learned and resourceful moralist of exhibitionist inclinations who picks his enemies with brio and, a few years ago, undertook a book to the effect that Mother Teresa was a mountebank. The Kissinger offensive was done in Harper's magazine and became a book. The call, no less, was to declare Henry Kissinger a war criminal and urge international courts to try him for, among other things, murder and kidnapping. That was a tall order of Hitchens, perhaps even outdoing the call to defrock Mother Teresa -- but the anti-Kissinger reserves were there, eager to serve.
What then happened was that the BBC thought the whole idea cinematic, which it is: "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" is playing in art movie houses. Movie clips of Kissinger and the company he has kept, and the public policy contentions in which he has figured, are abundant, and compliant in gathering together grand prosecutorial mosaics. The complaints are that Kissinger was culpable in illegal bombings of Cambodia, resulting in 3 million deaths; in the invasion of East Timor by the Indonesian military, resulting in 100,000 deaths; and in subverting 1968 peace talks which, if concluded, would have spared the 200,000-plus lives lost before the Vietnam War's end in 1975.
There isn't, of course, going to be any such war crimes trial of Henry Kissinger -- forget that, just to begin with. The man responsible for Vietnam and Cambodia was President Richard Nixon. The man responsible for East Timor is President Gerald Ford. Nixon is gone, but why isn't Hitchens calling for the trial of Gerald Ford as a war criminal? The answer is that Mr. Ford is not, so to speak, a photogenic war criminal, someone the sight of whom behind bars or swinging on a noose would give Jacobinical satisfaction. What is contemplated by the Hitchens offensive is, quite simply, denigration.