“War criminal,” says writer Christopher Hitchens in a brief shot in the opening minutes of The Trials of Henry Kissinger, “isn’t a piece of rhetoric, it isn’t a metaphor, it’s a job description.”
For several years now, this mercurial, chain-smoking Englishman has been trying to attach that “job description” to larger-than-life diplomat Kissinger. Last year, Hitchens wrote a best-selling book accusing him of crimes against humanity committed while serving in top-level positions under Presidents Nixon and Ford. And now, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, directed by Eugene Jarecki and produced by the BBC, distills Hitchens’ positions into a brisk and compelling 80-minute documentary.
Before we meet Hitchens, however, the film introduces us to Henry Kissinger, “shuttle diplomat” and celebrity, as he hops off jets to greet heads of state and hobnobs with Hollywood starlets. That is the man this movie deals with?the most famous diplomat in American history and a giant in both power politics and pop culture.
Interspersed with these images are a few other familiar faces: former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial for genocide, and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was likewise arrested for crimes against humanity. It’s in this company that the film claims Kissinger belongs. According to The Trials of Henry Kissinger, behind the thick glasses and oft-lampooned accent lies a ruthless, power-hungry despot responsible for thousands of deaths.
The Trials of Henry Kissinger will not win any awards for artistic innovation. It’s composed entirely of videotaped interviews and file footage overlaid with Brian Cox’s crisp, grave narration. It is stylistically no different from the excellent work that appears weekly on PBS’ Frontline. But while it may not be compelling art, it makes a compelling argument.
Flyers available in the lobby before the show read, “See the film, then decide,” implying some measure of objectivity in Trials’ proceedings. Don’t believe that for a second?the filmmakers clearly sympathize with Hitchens’ accusations, and spend the majority of the film documenting them.
These accusations are both serious and numerous: The film claims Kissinger subverted 1968 peace talks with the North Vietnamese to aid Republican election efforts before he was even a full-time government official. Later, as Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Kissinger is said to have masterminded the bombing of Cambodia in 1969 as well as the 1973 murder of a Chilean general and subsequent coup. Later, as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, Kissinger is accused of facilitating the massacre of 100,000 East Timorese by Indonesian forces in 1975. Each of these events is documented with unsettling images, showing vividly the devastating impact of these alleged decisions.
And with a furious sequence of declassified documents and compelling eyewitness testimony, each of these accusations is supported in an overly swift, but otherwise airtight manner. Kissinger has unequivocally refused to speak publicly to Hitchens, the filmmakers or anyone else about the accusations, so his defense falls to unenthusiastic New York Times columnist William Safire, staid former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and comically loony Kissinger military adviser and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. But in spite of his silence, the filmmakers turn to Kissinger often in the form of old quotes from television and radio interviews, immediately following them with documents directly challenging their veracity, hanging him with his own words. The defenders’ arguments, on the other hand, range from tepid to laughable, and invariably focus on disputing documentation and testimony rather than the basic claim Hitchens and the filmmakers make: that Kissinger was operating outside international law, and can rightly be brought to justice (a supremely controversial notion).
So toss aside any claims to objectivity upon entering the theater. The Trials of Henry Kissinger is a polemic, but it is a well-documented, thought-provoking and ultimately quite persuasive one. The film is a must-see for students of foreign affairs, if only to see that behind the power and glamour of the Kissinger mystique, there were very real consequences which raise some very grave questions.
