[In the following review of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Rubin commends Hitchens's criticism of Kissinger's egregious failures, but notes that Hitchens fails to acknowledge Kissinger's limited authority and shared complicity as a product of American democracy.]

There isn't much point to muckraking unless there is muck to be raked. In the actions of Henry Kissinger as American National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State, there is much muck to be raked, and Christopher Hitchens has set to work with a will. He has taken the two articles on Kissinger's tenure that he wrote for Harper's Magazine (he calls them “the core of this book”) and expanded them into a small book. The Trial of Henry Kissinger sets forth in some detail the inconsistencies and short-sighted policies of the Kissinger years as if they were the entire tale, and proposes legal action to discourage similar activities by others in the future.

There is much to the tale. Beginning with Kissinger's role in delaying a settlement in Vietnam in 1968, ostensibly to help Richard Nixon win election and himself to win high office in the Nixon White House, Hitchens relates and documents details of Kissinger's policies, resulting in violations of the treaty-based and customary laws of war in Indo-China; his friendship with an unspeakably violent regime in Pakistan that resulted in the independence of Bangladesh and the unnecessary loss of many lives on the sub-continent; his approval of American involvement in a coup in Chile that placed Augusto Pinochet in power and resulted in the assassination of Salvador Allende and many others; the victory of the Greek Colonels in their plan to get rid of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, which provoked the Turkish invasion of the northern part of that island (then and still now a member of the United Nations); the Indonesian atrocities in East Timor (an episode that cost many lives and was entirely omitted from Kissinger's three-volume analysis of his own statesmanship); and a vendetta waged against a Greek journalist, Elias P. Demetracopoulos, in Washington. The account is damning. On the other hand, there is nothing of Kissinger's successes, leaving the impression that there were none. The analysis seems to argue that there was criminality involved in Kissinger's failures and disregard of the lives lost in his mistaken efforts to advance what he conceived to be American policy interests—and his own career.

Reasonable people may, and certainly do, differ as to Kissinger's successes. They are not the subject of this book. As to his failures, there seem to be at least two major factors missing from Hitchens's account. First is the awkward fact that Kissinger himself was not in a position of command. His authority derived from action willingly undertaken by underlings, and delegations made by the President of the United States, Richard Nixon (and his short-term successor, Gerald Ford). Second is the equally awkward fact that the United States is a democracy and a majority of the people, including the richest and most influential constituents of the political faction in control of the levers of authority there, might be wrong in their political evaluations or the actions they approve and pay for. Even the selection procedure for the American presidency, involving votes by members of an “electoral college,” is not immune from manipulation. The problem is not unique to the United States.

As to the first, President Nixon was himself a devious politician with no great insight into international affairs and American constitutional relationships. In 1974, he chose to resign rather than be impeached after the revelation of election scandals. Kissinger never killed anyone himself, as far as is known. If his underlings found his orders immoral, they had the option of disobeying and speaking publicly, which some in fact did. Kissinger's success in achieving “deniability” indicates that he was a master of manipulation in a system that is subject to manipulation, not that he was a more monstrous villain than those who actually killed or tortured people.

As to the second, the evils of mob rule and mistaken majorities have been known at least since Aristotle wrote of them. Indeed, Plato, Aristotle's teacher, wrote of government by the best as an alternative to democracy, but found in Sicily during the fourth century BC that his own definition of the best was not the same as the definition acted on by those who had inherited authority. The American constitutional order still stands as a model of inhibition. Nothing that Kissinger could command would the consent of a killer or torturer, indeed no money could be spent even in American military adventures without the authorization of two Houses of a notably fractious American Congress. That the ambitions of conscienceless people might coincide with the power to fulfil those ambitions at the expense of somebody else was a fact foreseen by the framers of the American Constitution, but the safeguards they inserted in that document could not and cannot allay all evil.

The legal remedies proposed are a mixture of things likely to be effective and likely to be ineffective. Ineffective things are those that depend on the wisdom of unchecked majorities or complex (therefore manipulable) political bodies, like those that select judges for a proposed international criminal court, or the extension of national criminal jurisdiction to include the acts of foreigners abroad which the judges of the country exercising that jurisdiction find inconsistent with their own country's values or ambitions. Legal remedies likely to prove effective include civil suits for large damages in the courts of the countries in which villains have assets. Hitchens mentions these things, but, wisely in the light of his lack of legal credentials and the current popularity of the push for an international criminal court, does not take a definite position.

The reader is left only to wonder at the enormous fees that Kissinger receives for his contacts with various right-wing organizations, easing the investment and production difficulties of European and American corporations in Africa and Asia. Hitchens speaks of these fees as if those purchasing the products made in countries whose leadership is anathema had no choice in the matter. But personal or group boycotts are always available. And publicity by alert media is the only path to that. With the exception of a few brave souls like Christopher Hitchens, the media are failing in their job.

Unfortunately, there are a few errors in the book, and a rather defective index. There are repeated confusions of criminal law with civil law, and international law with municipal law, but those are confusions that reflect common misapprehensions. In sum, the book is not to be taken as a precise text in the technical areas it touches, but as a useful summary of the evils that can flow, and have flowed and continue to flow, from the otherwise admirable American democracy.