Kissinger’s Shadow by Greg Grandin Page A

“You’re tearing the country apart domestically.”
    Kissinger’s former colleagues weren’t aware that Nixon and Kissinger had already been secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos for over a year (and would continue to bomb for three more before Congress put an end to it). They knew only about the invasion, and that was bad enough. “Sickening,” Schelling said. Today in the United States, a shared and largely unquestioned assumption, irrespective of political affiliation, holds that Washington has the right to use military force against the “safe havens” of terrorists or potential terrorists, even if those havens are found in sovereign countries we are not at war with. This assumption was the premise of George W. Bush’s 2002 invasion of Afghanistan and Barack Obama’s expansion of drone attacks in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, along with his most recent military operations against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. This reasoning was not widely held in 1970. Schelling’s Harvard delegation rejected Kissinger’s attempt to justify the invasion by citing the need to destroy communist “sanctuaries.” As one reporter summed up the group’s objections, violation of a neutral country’s sovereignty “could be used by anyone else in the world as a precedent for invading another country, in order, for example, to clear out terrorists.” Even if the invasion succeeded on its own terms and cleared out enemy sanctuaries, Schelling later told a journalist, “it still wouldn’t have been worth the invasion of another country.”
    The meeting with Kissinger took place in the old Situation Room in the White House basement. Schelling began by introducing the group and stating its purpose, but Kissinger interrupted him: “I know who you are … you’re all good friends from Harvard University.” “No,” said Schelling, “we’re a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy and we have come to tell you so. We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisers.” Kissinger, Schelling recalled later, “went gray in the face, he slumped in his chair. I thought at the time that he suffered serious depression.” At one point, Kissinger asked if someone could tell him what “mistakes” the administration had made. It was then that Schelling asked Kissinger the question about monsters: “You look out the window, and you see a monster. And you turn to the guy standing next to you at the very same window, and say, ‘Look, there’s a monster.’ He then looks out the window and doesn’t see a monster at all. How do you explain to him that there really is a monster?”
    Schelling continued: “As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand.”
    â€œWe just don’t know which one is scarier,” Schelling said.

 
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    Ends and Means
    What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.
    â€”Henry Kissinger
    At Harvard as a graduate student, Henry Kissinger and his doctoral adviser, William Yandell Elliott, often took long Sunday walks together in Concord. On one of these outings, Elliott—described by the Harvard Crimson as “a large, flamboyant Virginian … a grandiose, hulking figure who often wore a white plantation suit and a Panama hat”—urged his protégé to live his life by Immanuel Kant’s famous ethical imperative: “Treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” That dictum was a response to the utilitarian calculus influential