Your Talking Dog has previously placed Henry Kissinger in a significant category: one of the five most evil men of the twentieth century, and the only one of the five (the others being Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot) to be not only still alive and free, but often sought for "a-list" parties. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens, a point by point bill of indictment is presented against Kissinger, in a manner described by the Literary Review (and noted on the back cover of the paperback version) "This book is so studiedly defamatory that if Kissinger values his reputations, he really must sue". Quite so; this thin volume, derived largely from articles Hitchens published in Harpers, pulls no punches.
Hitchens notes that Kissinger, alas, did not sue him. Henry, apparently, has a problem with courtrooms. Hitchens pictures an amusing scene, where an interviewer is present in the office of publishing mogul Michael Korda, who interrupts his session on another author to call Kissinger, looks up and says "His phone number (759-7919 in Manhattan) should be 1-800 Cambodia-- or better yet 1-800 Bomb Cambodia", and then has a conversation concerning the jurisdictional implications of the Pinochet detention in Britain. I read an article by Kissinger in Foreign Affairs Quarterly denouncing so-called "universal jurisdiction", where some countries claim the right to try anyone for human rights violations. To the extent such political prosecutions have permitted the likes of Belgium to indict Ariel Sharon, Kissinger has made his point; to the extent that Henry Kissinger walks the Earth as a free man, proponents of such jurisdiction have made theirs. Henry must now tread lightly when traveling abroad, if he does so at all.
The book documents Henry's public career, starting with his audition for the Nixon Administration, playing the turncoat at the Paris peace talks, where he effectively helped Tricky Dick undermine the Johnson Administration's conduct of peace talks by helping to persuade the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal from Nixon, only to sell them out and get them virtually the same deal four years later with untold thousands killed in the interim. As Hitchens describes it:
"This is what it took to promote Henry Kissinger. To promote him from being a mediocre and opportunist academic to becoming an international potentate. The signature qualities were there from the inaugural moment: the sycophancy and the duplicity; the power worship and the absence of scruple; the empty trading of old non-friends for new non-friends. And the distinctive effects were also present: the uncounted and expendable corpses; the official and unofficial lying about the cost; the heavy and pompous pseudo-indignation when unwelcome questions were asked. Kissinger's global career started as it meant to go on. It debauched the American republic and American democracy, and it levied a hideous toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies."
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