From: MATHRICH@umcvmb.bitnet ("Rich Winkel UMC Math Department")
Newsgroups: soc.politics
Subject: October surprise and circular history
Date: 25 Nov 89 00:14:32 GMT
Has anyone picked up Seymour Hersh's book "The Price of Power," concerning Henry Kissinger in the Nixon white house? Hersh has won a ton of major awards for investigative journalism, including a Pulitzer prize and four Polk awards, for reporting on subjects ranging from the My Lai massacre to the CIA in Chile to the CIA in the US. (This is the book which got Hersh in trouble with former Indian prime minister Desai, who Hersh claims was a CIA asset. Desai sued Hersh for libel in a US court, which recently ruled in Hersh's favor) It's a wonder that old Henry K. continues to show his face in public. Here are some interesting tidbits from the first chapter:
Immediately prior to the 1968 elections, the Johnson administration was in hot pursuit of a way out of vietnam, and was engaged in an intensive round of secret negotiations with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris. At the same time, Kissinger was in hot pursuit of a high level foreign policy position in the next administration, be it democrat or republican. He was openly involved with the Rockefeller campaign until its loss to nixon at the republican convention, after which he secretly offered his services to both the Humphrey and Nixon camps, when they were about even in the polls. His pitch to Humphrey was that he had access to a Nixon 'shit file' compiled by the Rockefeller campaign which he was willing to provide to the democrats. At the same time, he contacted the Nixon campaign and made a much more interesting offer: he offered to spy on the johnson administration's secret negotiation efforts in paris.
The nixon camp was convinced that if johnson managed to make substantial progress towards a vietnam pullout before the election, the election would be lost. They'd already cultivated a high level
contact in the johnson white house who was supplying them with information concerning the negotiations, and were also secretly contacting the president of south vietnam (Nguyen van Thieu), trying to convince him that he'd get a better peace settlement from a nixon white house than a humphrey white house, in an attempt to discourage him from cooperating with any peace agreement before the election. (Is this starting to sound familiar?)
Kissinger's previous consultancy jobs with the kennedy and johnson administrations had made him many friends in the US foreign policy apparatus, where he was highly regarded and still considered an 'insider.' He exploited these contacts to gain access to the goings-on in paris and provided the nixonites with up to the minute information, which the nixon camp used in planning their strategy to abort any peace agreement prior to the election. Three days before the election, when the negotiations seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough, and after Thieu had agreed to participate in the talks, Thieu suddenly backed away from his prior position and refused to participate, thus sabotaging the talks and dealing the death blow to a democratic succession to the presidency.
If this STILL doesn't sound familiar to you, get a load of this:
Kissinger's contact/recruiter in the nixon camp was none other than Richard Allen...that's the same Richard Allen who allegedly spearheaded the secret negotiations between the reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the american embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, in order to keep Carter's negotiations from producing a breakthrough which could have won him the election.
None of the alleged participants in this conspiracy have sued Hersh
for libel.
Rich
[ Which, of course, doesn't necessarily mean anything to the allegation's truthfullness. If true, though, it certainly casts Kissinger as one of the the ultimate pratictioners of "Realpolitik" (in just about every sense) in this half of the century. Why did Humphrey turn him down? Humphrey was well known as another artist of the "promise them anything" school, after all. - CWM]