The Blood Telegram Page 28
This exhausted, dispirited American mood proved a boon to the White House. Nixon’s political advisers expected that Americans, soured on overseas adventures, would prove apathetic about the Bengalis, so they exaggeratedly painted Kennedy and the Democrats as calling for intervention in another civil war in Asia. At the start of the Pakistan army’s crackdown, Nixon told Kissinger, “The people that bitch about Vietnam bitched about it because we intervened in what they say was a civil war.… Now some of those same bastards … want us to intervene in Biafra. And some of those same people want us to intervene here. Both civil wars. Real civil wars.” Kissinger later said that “the very people who were accusing us of being too deeply involved in Southeast Asia are accusing us of not having had enough involvement in South Asia. The one is against the communists, the other would have been against Yahya.”6
This was, in the end, a crushingly effective argument. Despite the extensive and heartrending press coverage, the advocacy of Kennedy and others in Congress, and some public activism, the American public never really mobilized for the Bengalis. Disillusioned and enervated from Vietnam, Americans were not about to risk another Asian quagmire.
“ONE OF THE FEW STICKS THEY COULD BEAT HIM WITH”
Ordinarily the daily sufferings of the desperately poor in South Asia did not attract much attention from the U.S. press, let alone Congress. But Yahya’s onslaught was the kind of spectacular event that drew notice. With so much vivid media coverage, this human catastrophe could be explained in simple terms to constituents—and blamed on the Nixon administration.7
The Indian government, accustomed to dealing with its own rambunctious public and Parliament, took its case directly to the American people. Indian diplomats eagerly reported that the American press had almost universally condemned Pakistan’s massacres, with even the conservative Chicago Tribune blasting Pakistan. There was, the Indian embassy in Washington reported, widespread outrage among American academics, journalists, and officials. Indian diplomats assiduously courted Congress, cannily working over impressionable new members of Congress, and lobbying congressional staffers.8
Indian officials were coolly cynical about the motives of leading Democrats. While some might be genuinely interested in South Asia, an Indian diplomat secretly wrote, it was likely that most of the important pro-Indian senators, including Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, were driven by “their opposition to the President” and because they were “Presidential hopefuls.” Nixon and Kissinger could have agreed with every word. The Indian diplomat concluded, “They found that this was one of the few sticks they could beat him with.”9
Nonetheless, the Indian government, reckoning (wrongly) that Muskie was the Democratic front-runner for the 1972 presidential election, launched a charm offensive. The Indian ambassador in Washington told him that “the Presidential crown had been inherited by those who had already been to India,” and shamelessly reported that Muskie’s wife, who was keen to visit India, was taking “Yoga lessons from an Indian lady.”10
Nixon was more worried about another Democratic presidential contender: Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator who fast became the loudest voice in Congress decrying the atrocities in East Pakistan. Nixon, with an obsessive fear and loathing of the Kennedys that went deeper than political calculations, wanted to wiretap the senator. The White House had good reason to worry about Kennedy, who was neck and neck with Muskie as the top choice of Democrats for their presidential nominee. In a direct race, polls put Nixon ahead of Kennedy, but the challenger had plenty of time to close in on the president, and often slammed Nixon on foreign policy, including Vietnam and China. However, if he was going to run, Kennedy needed to shake off scandal: in July 1969, he claimed he made a fatal wrong turn on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, and Mary Jo Kopechne, a young worker on Robert Kennedy’s campaign, had drowned in his submerged car. He had taken ten hours to report it to the police.11
When the killing started in East Pakistan, Kennedy quickly got hold of some of Archer Blood’s cables and began giving speeches harshly denouncing Yahya’s killings, Nixon’s silence, and the use of U.S. arms by Pakistan. On May 3, he told the Senate that thousands or even millions of lives were at stake, “whose destruction will burden the conscience of all mankind.” He complained that Blood’s reports were being suppressed, and that he was being denied access to cable traffic from the Dacca consulate.12
The flight of millions of refugees gave Kennedy a platform: he was chairman of the Senate’s subcommittee on refugees. He highlighted the ugly fact that the bulk of the exiles were Hindus, blasted the White House for “rhetoric and tokenism and paper plans” in helping the refugees, and denounced Nixon’s “continued silence, and apparent indifference, over the actions of the American supplied Pakistan army.” He was so vocal that he became an overnight hero among Bengalis, while Pakistan griped that his meddling in its domestic affairs was a violation of the United Nations Charter. At the White House, Kennedy’s advocacy set off all possible alarms, with Kissinger and Alexander Haig darkly suspecting that he was in cahoots with the State Department. By June, as Nixon reeled from Vietnam demonstrations, a new poll showed Kennedy tied with Nixon in a presidential heat.13
Other senators rallied too, including some Republicans, and almost all leading Democrats. Muskie was horrified that “American tanks, planes and guns have been used to help level unprotected cities and to kill an estimated 200,000 unarmed civilians,” while Walter Mondale introduced legislation to suspend military aid to Pakistan. William Fulbright, the powerful Arkansas Democrat who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked the administration for the Blood telegram and other Dacca cables. When the State Department refused, Fulbright and other senators publicly excoriated the Nixon administration for downplaying the atrocities.14
Stymied, Fulbright instead summoned Blood—just back from Dacca and sinking into despair at his desk job at the State Department— to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 24. Blood, defying Nixon’s policy, said that the United States should speak out against the killing, suspend economic aid to Pakistan, and pressure Yahya to make a political settlement. Although seemingly trying to be circumspect, he said that the “ongoing persecution of Hindus” suggested that some of the Pakistan army wanted “a general exodus of the Hindu minority.” Yahya himself was disturbed by Blood’s testimony.15
Kennedy had Blood testify before his own subcommittee four days later. There was a raging thunderstorm that day, with lightning bolts so intense that they jolted the senators. But while Kennedy surely wanted pyrotechnics to match, Blood was still thoroughly a Foreign Service man despite it all, and he was not about to air everything in front of the barbarian Senate. Yanked back to Washington, he had not vented his wrath in the opinion pages or on the airwaves. Nor had he resigned in protest, as several of Kissinger’s staffers had angrily done over the invasion of Cambodia. Blood did not mention his dissent telegram, and while he strongly hinted that he had left Dacca in unorthodox circumstances, Kennedy did not catch on.16
While Blood was privately pleased that someone of Kennedy’s stature was taking an interest in the Bengalis, the former consul’s tone was composed and professional. Blood still harbored professional ambitions, and he had a State Department boss keeping a watchful eye on him as he testified, who would pounce if he spilled any classified information. He may well have been shaken up by his sudden downfall. Still, he was under oath, and his answers were devastating. He testified of “a continued exodus” of Bengali refugees up until the day he departed Dacca. They were fleeing from any city or village that the military had struck. Most of them were Hindus, leaving because of specific persecution. Kennedy seemed a little frustrated with Blood’s measured performance, but the diplomat’s work provided him the basis for his own best grandstanding. The senator dramatically ripped into the senior State Department official there about U.S. weapons, forcing him to admit that Pakistan had used F-86 Sabre jet fighters and
M-24 Chaffee tanks—a fact established by Blood and his team.17
Meanwhile, the press too kept up a drumbeat. Reporters snuck into East Pakistan, and the refugees in India brought with them terrible tales, which Pakistan could not censor. From Calcutta, the Indian army did what it could to encourage journalists to venture across the border into East Pakistan.18
Bengalis were stunned to hear that some U.S. arms were still making their way to the Pakistan army. In the midst of the army’s terror, these fearful people got their news by radio. “Why are you sending the army more guns?” a Bengali bitterly asked a Washington Post reporter.19
In London, the Sunday Times published a detailed and gruesome story by a Pakistani journalist, Anthony Mascarenhas, with the screaming headline GENOCIDE. Newsweek ran a horrific cover story. Village after village had been reduced to rubble, with stinking corpses. The magazine said that a quarter of a million Bengalis had died. It told of a three-year-old child and his teenage mother, both of them refugees: “They sat on ground made muddy by the steady drizzle of the summer rains. The baby’s stomach was grotesquely distended, his feet swollen, his arms no thicker than a man’s finger. His mother tried to coax him to eat some rice and dried fish. Finally, the baby mouthed the food feebly, wheezed—and died.”20
Trying to blunt the impact of these terrible stories, Pakistan allowed in some foreign correspondents. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who had been expelled from Dacca in March, jumped at the chance. He remembers the Pakistan army’s contempt for Bengalis: “Even the officers in charge of these units would say, ‘You can’t trust these people, they’re low, they lie.’ ” The officers gave “no denials that they had just killed them.” He recalls, “You’d see places where they had marked little wooden houses as Hindus.” Survivors told him that the army would “come through yelling, ‘Are there any Hindus there?’ When they found out there were, they would kill them.” He concludes, “It was a genocide”—perhaps even a more clear case than Cambodia.21
In the New York Times, Schanberg reported, “The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow ‘H’s’ on the Hindu shops still standing in this town.” Emphasizing the targeting of Hindus, he described “the hate and terror and fear” throughout the “conquered province.” Back in Dacca at last, Schanberg found the city “half-deserted,” with fresh loads of troops arriving daily from West Pakistan at the airport. Terrified merchants had taken down signs in the Bengali language and put up new ones in English, because they did not know Urdu. He wrote that foreign diplomats estimated that the army had killed at least two hundred thousand Bengalis.22
Soon after, Schanberg says, the Pakistani authorities kicked him out for the second time. They sent an officer he knew to tell him he had to be on a plane out the next day. The reporter was glad that nobody roughed him up. When the Pakistani tried to get him to pay for the flight, he refused. Schanberg says, “So I saved my paper a one-way ticket.”
By early summer, the White House believed that it had a daunting public opinion problem. “It was very controversial on the human rights and genocide dimension,” says Winston Lord, Kissinger’s special assistant. “The media, Capitol Hill, the Democrats, and some Republicans joined in.” He says, “On a public basis, Nixon and Kissinger couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore a domestic firestorm.”23
Nixon and Kissinger self-pityingly catalogued the foes arrayed against them. Nixon said that “the American press is the same as the Indian press, follows everything they say”; Kissinger said that “the entire liberal community” is “emotionally against Yahya”; and Nixon said that “we are fought by all the Democrats,” particularly Kennedy. The Indians, Kissinger said, “are already killing us in the press and lobbying with the Congress.” When the Indian ambassador mentioned U.S. public opinion, Kissinger snapped, “don’t threaten us with the terrible unpopularity the US will have if it does not fall in line with your policies and view-point.” Kissinger had to explain to a Chinese delegation that the New York Times and other publications did not represent the administration’s policy on Pakistan. While Nixon and Kissinger agreed that they had to rebut congressional and press criticism, they needed to do so without saying anything that might offend Yahya.24
That was uphill work. Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide for South Asia, pointed out that the administration was defending killing and the squelching of democracy. When Kissinger tried to coach the Pakistani ambassador on public relations, the ambassador complained that a World Bank team described East Pakistan as resembling “Arnheim after the Nazi blitz” and “a country after a nuclear attack.” Nixon and Kissinger urged their officials to reach out to the press, with Kissinger arguing that background briefings for reporters were better than congressional testimony. “That’s where it counts,” agreed Nixon. “The hell with the damn Congress.”25
ARMS AND INFLUENCE
Nixon and Kissinger never reprimanded Pakistan about its use of U.S. weaponry; left to their own devices, they would almost certainly have found a way to get substantial arms supplies flowing to Pakistan. According to a report by Congress’s investigative office, at the start of the crackdown on March 25, Pakistan was owed roughly $35 million worth of U.S. munitions that had not been shipped. As Kissinger’s staff noted, “Our military sales to Pakistan are of paramount psychological and practical significance to the West Pakistanis.” Without the deterrent effect of U.S. military supply to Pakistan, both Nixon and Kissinger believed that India would likely attack. Kissinger later suggested that “the best way to deter war would have been to continue arms deliveries to Pakistan.”26
But Nixon and Kissinger were boxed in by the combined pressures of Congress and public opinion, and some deft maneuvering by the State Department. The department had managed to impose an informal, temporary administrative halt on shipments; this was not meant to last, but as the American public recoiled at the atrocities, it gradually sank in for Nixon and Kissinger that lifting that suspension would be disastrous.27
Meanwhile, Congress redoubled its demands to cut off military supply to Pakistan after the New York Times scoop about two Pakistani freighters bearing U.S. military equipment. Frank Church, an influential Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fervidly asked Nixon to send the Coast Guard to intercept one freighter in U.S. waters. Kennedy accused the Nixon administration of not just “silence and indifference, but a degree of complicity, which is unconscionable.” But Nixon and Kissinger flatly refused to suspend all military shipments as the State Department wanted.28
So the Democrats struck back, introducing measures to halt military and economic aid to Pakistan until the refugees returned home. Church stormed that “the U.S. Government is aiding and abetting a terrible massacre on the part of the West Pakistan military regime.” William Proxmire, a Wisconsin senator who tenaciously gave thousands of speeches from 1967 until 1986 urging U.S. ratification of the Genocide Convention, decried “the genocide which is occurring at this very moment.” And George McGovern, who would be the antiwar Democratic candidate running against Nixon in 1972, declared, “We have not learned the lesson of Vietnam if we insist on taking sides in another Asian civil war.”29
Nixon was still, as Kissinger noted, “very reluctant” to do anything to halt arms shipments to Pakistan. Kissinger said there was only about $4 million left in the dwindling pipeline. But they now had no choice but to lie low, as Kissinger’s staff unhappily pointed out. Their only hope was to write off military aid, the better to defend continuing economic aid. The decisions on arms shipments were slipping out of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s hands. Yet even after the killing started, U.S. military services continued to offer new sales to Pakistan, worth over $10 million. It was not until July or August that the Pentagon instructed the military services to stop making these offers. Although the numbers vary somewhat, according to Congress’s investigative office, between March 25 and the end of September, Pakistan got about $3.8 million worth of U.S. munitions.30
If Congress was the hamme
r, the State Department was the anvil. Kissinger was appalled to realize that, contrary to Nixon’s instructions in June, the State Department had managed to largely cut off arms supplies to Pakistan.
Kissinger fumed when a senior State Department official told him that resuming arms deliveries would be “suicide.” Kissinger asked, “Do the Pakistanis know they are under the guillotine?” He heatedly rebuked State Department staff for working around the president’s specific refusal to cut off military supply to Pakistan. By the middle of August, he said, “we will have done exactly what the President did not want to do in June except for $4 million”—those last remaining shipments in the pipeline.31
But writing privately to Nixon, an embarrassed Kissinger had to admit how their own bureaucracy had outfoxed them. Despite Kissinger’s insistence that the administration should do nothing to pressure Pakistan or undercut Nixon’s “special relationship with President Yahya,” the State Department’s tentative early hold on arms shipments had turned out to be far more potent than expected. (Although the Pakistani military was troubled by the resulting loss of weaponry, Yahya himself was relieved to avoid the humiliations of an outright embargo or U.S. condemnation.)32