The Blood Telegram Page 3
Nixon’s next stop was Pakistan. That went delightfully. “Pakistan is a country I would like to do everything for,” he enthused when he got back to Washington. He found the Pakistanis to be staunchly anticommunist and pro-American. “The people have less complexes than the Indians,” he said. “The Pakistanis are completely frank, even when it hurts.” He was attracted less to the chaotic city streets than to the army’s pristine cantonments. There he was impressed by the blunt generals, particularly General Muhammad Ayub Khan, who would a few years afterward stage a coup and become the first of Pakistan’s military dictators. Nixon later wrote that he was haunted for the rest of his life by Ayub’s lament about U.S. fickleness: “it is dangerous to be a friend of the United States.”4
He returned to Washington as a staunch advocate of aid for Pakistan. With his support, the Eisenhower administration championed a muscular Cold War alliance with the country. The United States was seeking anti-Soviet allies across the Middle East and Asia, and newborn Pakistan intrepidly signed up as a double treaty ally of the United States, joining both the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). Pakistan helpfully provided a base in Peshawar from which the Americans launched U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union—one of which was famously shot down by the Soviets in 1960.5
Most important, after Nixon’s visit, Eisenhower went ahead with a deal to start providing Pakistan with military aid. In 1954, the United States began supplying weapons to Pakistan, which was always seeking advantage against its Indian foe. Despite Eisenhower’s reassurances that these arms were meant to ward off communists, India saw itself as the inevitable target.6
The Pakistan army grew strong with U.S. help. Over eleven years, by India’s conservative estimate, the United States supplied Pakistan with between $1.5 billion and $2 billion worth of military equipment. India bitterly catalogued Pakistan’s windfall: receiving 640 tanks, complete with modern artillery; modernizing the equipment for five army divisions; establishing three modern air bases, a naval dockyard at Karachi, and a Chittagong base. Pakistan got a submarine, a fleet tanker, and other ships. And the United States provided Pakistan with a good chunk of an air force: two squadrons of B-57 bombers, nine squadrons of F-86 Sabre jet fighters, a squadron of fighter-interceptors, thirty armed helicopters, and—crucial for a country that had to shuttle its soldiers from West Pakistan to East Pakistan—a squadron of colossal C-130 troop transport planes.7
Indians, still aggrieved by the fresh horrors of Partition, were infuriated. Nehru fumed, “Pakistan becomes practically a colony of the United States.” To offset not just Pakistan but also the menace of China, India bought large quantities of Soviet weaponry. The United States and India sparred with each other, as insult followed insult on both sides. It only somewhat lessened the blow when Eisenhower, fearing that poverty bred radicalism, started providing substantial economic aid to India.8
John Kennedy, as president, did what he could to mend fences. Viewing India as an exemplar of noncommunist democracy and development, he boosted economic aid. When China went to war against India in 1962, with the Indian armed forces faltering, Nehru directly asked Kennedy for military help on a massive scale. Kennedy did not give Nehru everything he wanted, but he provided automatic weapons and ammunition and sent C-130s to move Indian troops. The military assistance continued after India’s humiliating defeat in the China war, reinforcing India’s mountain divisions with mortars, guns, and grenades to ward off Chinese troops in the Himalayas. This too was welcome, although India’s defense ministry called it “very limited aid”—still much less than what Pakistan had gotten.9
When Pakistan attacked India in 1965, in an explosion of the Kashmir dispute, the United States was in the awkward position of providing arms to both sides. Lyndon Johnson’s administration pressed to bring a U.S. arms embargo crashing down on India and Pakistan, which would still formally be in place at the time of the 1971 crisis. Although the cutoff was aimed at both antagonists, it hurt Pakistan much more and left that government feeling betrayed. Nor were the Indians happy. To them, it was intolerable that the United States did not condemn Pakistan for aggression.10
After the war, India slowly bought small amounts of U.S. arms. But all told, at best, India had received less than a quarter of what Pakistan was getting. India also won new agricultural aid from the United States, which came with unwelcome policy demands. When the Indian government sharpened its criticism of the Vietnam War, Johnson, offended, put that aid on a short leash. Once again, the governments snarled at each other. By the time Richard Nixon became president, there was much to be done to reestablish friendship between the two great democracies.11
NIXON AND INDIA
“I don’t like the Indians,” Nixon snapped at the height of the Bengali crisis. Beyond his prejudices, he had reason piled upon reason for this distaste for India and Indians. The most basic was the Cold War: presidents of the United States since Harry Truman had been frustrated by India’s policy of nonalignment, which Nixon, much like his predecessors, viewed as Nehruvian posturing. India was on suspiciously good terms with the Soviet Union. Since the days of Kennedy and Johnson, India had been pillorying the United States for the Vietnam War, and Nixon got an ample share.12
Then there was realpolitik. Some Americans romanticized India’s democracy, but not Nixon. He was unimpressed with the world’s largest republic, believing to the end of his days that the United States should base its foreign policy on what a country did outside its borders, not on whether it treated its people decently at home. So India’s domestic system made little impact on the president.13
Nixon was baffled and annoyed by Americans’ popular sympathies for India, which he repeatedly described as a psychological disorder. He scorned a “phobia” among some Americans that “everything that India does is good, and everything Pakistan does is bad,” and once told the military leader of Pakistan, “There is a psychosis in this country about India.” The Americans who most liked India tended to be the ones that Nixon could not stand. India was widely seen as a State Department favorite, irritating the president. He recoiled from the country’s mystical fascination to the hippie counterculture, which he despised. Henry Kissinger thought that Nixon saw Democratic “obsequiousness toward India as a prime example of liberal softheadedness.”14
Nixon’s anti-Indian leanings had been reinforced when John Kennedy took a warmly pro-India line. India seemed a cause for the Democrats. This point was once driven home by George H. W. Bush, Nixon’s ambassador at the United Nations, who knew how to play up to his boss. Bush said that a friend of Kennedy’s had explained that “Kennedy spent more time on India, and the mystique, I know they didn’t like us, but it was a kind of a liberal mystique.” That, Bush and Nixon agreed, was what they were up against.15
On top of that, there was a mutual loathing between Nixon and Indira Gandhi. He had not cared for Nehru, her father, either, but she had an extraordinary ability to get under his skin. Back in 1967, while Nixon was out of power and planning his way back, he had met again with Gandhi on a visit to Delhi. But when he called on the new prime minister at her house, she had seemed conspicuously bored, despite the short duration of their talk. After about twenty minutes of strained chat, she asked one of her aides, in Hindi, how much longer this was going to take. Nixon had not gotten the precise meaning, but he sure caught the tone. As president, Nixon kept up his personalized approach to foreign policy, trusting his own impressions of world leaders, visiting thirty-one countries, and holding White House summits with most of the key chiefs. For all his talk of realpolitik, he could be surprisingly individualized in his foreign policy judgments. He once said that “her father was just as bad as she is.” His first visit to India as president was chilly and strained.16
Finally, there was friendship. Richard Nixon liked very few people, but he did like General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. Over and over, he privately spoke of Yahya with an uncharacteristic blend of admiration a
nd affection.17
Despite all his global face time, Nixon was a solitary, awkward, reclusive man. (Kissinger, who could not bring himself to say that he was fond of the president, once famously asked, “Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?”) His only true friend was Bebe Rebozo, a Florida banker. He said that “it doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy.” Even H. R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, worried that the boss was too much in his own head, once tried to find the president a friend, tracking down an oilman whom Nixon had reportedly liked in his Los Angeles days and installing him in a bogus White House job. (It didn’t take.)18
Kissinger said that Nixon had been treated very well by Pakistan even when he was out of office, and remembered that gratefully. Nixon, who had long had a soft spot for Pakistani military officers, particularly took to Yahya. The dictator was a beefy man, with amazing spiky black eyebrows and slicked-back gray hair cut with a white streak. “I’m a soldier,” he liked to say, with no patience for the wiles of politicians. Yahya had become president of Pakistan in March 1969 by pushing aside another general and imposing martial law. Kissinger once wrote, “Yahya is tough, direct, and with a good sense of humor. He talks in a very clipped way, is a splendid product of Sandhurst and affects a sort of social naivete but is probably much more complicated than this.”19
Maybe not. Despite Nixon’s affection for Yahya, the strongman had none of the U.S. president’s complexity and keen intelligence, let alone his focus. Yahya drank early and often. “He starts with cognac for breakfast and continues drinking throughout the day; night often finding him in a sodden state,” sniffed the rival West Pakistani politician Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Archer Blood disliked Yahya’s “brusque, strutting way,” was unmoved by his British affectations and swagger stick, and leery of the general’s contempt for civilian politicians. Kissinger, who did not suffer even clever people gladly, eventually concluded that Yahya was a moron. But the general was certainly bright enough to realize the strategic advantages of nurturing his friendship with the president of the United States.20
Henry Kissinger’s office at the White House was a thrilling place to work. “The power was there, he was gathering it up,” says Samuel Hoskinson, who served there as Kissinger’s junior official for South Asia. “You felt like you were at the political center of the universe. He and the president, that was where the decisions were made.”
Kissinger, just forty-eight years old in 1971, was relatively new to the world spotlight then, and growing into the role. To Nixon, his audience of one, the White House national security advisor was unctuous and ingratiating, matching presidential moods and tempers. But to his White House staff and the rest of the foreign policy machine, he was all rough edges, jealous of any rivals. “He was not the kindly gentleman that he is today,” remembers Hoskinson.
The real decisions were taken in private by Nixon and Kissinger. Throughout the crisis, Kissinger would hold countless meetings in the White House Situation Room with senior government officials, but these had the feeling of theater. Kissinger was often more accommodating in group discussions, toying with ideas, yielding some ground to the collective skepticism around the Situation Room table; but when he was with Nixon alone, something much closer to his real, unvarnished views could resurface. In the Oval Office or the president’s hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, Kissinger played to the only person who mattered. He would encourage or awkwardly join in Nixon’s profane denunciations of the Indians. When Nixon swore, Kissinger swore too, detonating the occasional curse to keep up with the president. (Kissinger, whose own taste in profanity ran more to “balderdash” and “poppycock” than Nixon’s really foul stuff, rather touchingly tended to say “goddamned,” getting the grammar right.) Again and again, Kissinger would stoke Nixon’s anger against the Indians, to the president’s satisfaction. “Henry is my least pathological pro-India lover around here,” Nixon once said proudly.21
Kissinger came to the White House with a brilliant mind, a profound knowledge of world history, and a firm, principled commitment to realpolitik. From his earliest writings, he had argued that foreign policy ought not to be driven by the demands of justice. That, he thought, was the road to total war. Instead, Kissinger believed that a society’s principles, no matter how deep-rooted or heartfelt, had to be compromised in the name of international stability. His focus, like that of his heroes Metternich and Castlereagh, was on the great powers. Both for him and Nixon, everything—from the Middle East to Latin America to the Indian subcontinent, and even the crucial challenge of getting the United States out of Vietnam—relied on the core realpolitik task of building a Cold War balance of power.22
He became the essential man in the making of American foreign policy, second only to the president. “Nixon wanted to control foreign policy,” says Hoskinson, “and he had his wizard from Harvard to help him.” In these early days, Nixon was dazzled by Kissinger’s ability to put foreign policy in “the framework of philosophy. You’ve got to talk philosophy, you’ve got to be a great mosaic and you put in the pieces. State is not thinking in mosaic terms. The communists do. The Chinese do. The Russians do. We must.”23
As the White House national security advisor, Kissinger was locked in nonstop bureaucratic combat with the ineffectual secretary of state, William Rogers. But it was never a halfway equal contest. Kissinger was vastly more important to the president, seen as something close to acceptably loyal, although a prima donna. Haldeman, who had to keep the staff functioning, exasperatedly wrote that “the two of them just stay on a collision course.” The president had to conduct an epic smoothing of ruffled feathers, which took its toll on him. Nixon and Haldeman agonized over the “whole Rogers-K problem,” with Nixon repeatedly telling Haldeman that “the price that he [Nixon] has to pay to K in terms of emotional drain on himself is very great.” Again and again, Kissinger threatened to resign, reassured every time of his indispensability. In time, all the grandstanding and bigthinking wore Nixon out. The president once wearily told Haldeman, “Henry talks an awful lot.”24
Kissinger concentrated power in the White House, sidelining the rest of the government. He had long held a profound disdain for the bureaucracy, going well beyond the standard Washington complaints about sclerotic inefficiency. The parochial experts could not see the big picture as great statesmen did. He skirmished daily with the State Department. Zhou Enlai once told him, “You don’t like bureaucracy.” Kissinger retorted, “Yes, and it’s mutual; the bureaucracy doesn’t like me.”25
In this antipathy, he matched up neatly with the president. To Nixon, the lower echelons of government seemed stacked with northeastern elites who had never accepted him. He once told his cabinet, “Down in the government are a bunch of sons of bitches.… We’ve checked and found that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are against us; they’re bastards who are here to screw us.” The president’s suspicion included Kissinger’s own team at the White House, which had no shortage of northeasterners with fancy degrees. Soon before the Bangladesh crisis broke, he instructed Haldeman and Kissinger’s own deputy national security advisor, Alexander Haig Jr., to “make sure that Henry examines his staff very closely and is really set to kick out any potential traitors and not let any others in.”26
Kissinger’s singular grip on White House power was the stuff of legend among the diplomatic corps posted to Washington. The Indians were well aware of Kissinger’s outsized influence in the making of foreign policy—not least because he worked hard to let them know it. India’s ambassador in Washington explained to his foreign ministry all about Kissinger’s dominance in making foreign policy, while wryly warning that Kissinger’s self-promotion was so pervasive that it rendered his words untrustworthy. The Indian ambassador reported cattily, “Kissinger, on his part, never misses an opportunity to emphasize and underscore his own importance.” Once, after a Washington dinner, “while we were talking, he was called to the telephone five times and while othe
rs were only surmising that the calls were from the President, he himself made remarks which were intended to confirm that suspicion.”27
Kissinger, for all his brilliance, knew a lot more about Metternich’s Austria than he did about modern South Asia. (He once said, “I would not recognize Pushtoon agitation if it hit me in the face.”) His preoccupations at this time were the Vietnam War and the opening to China, not India and Pakistan. He relied on his own small, skillful staff at the White House’s National Security Council.28
The White House’s real expert on South Asia was Samuel Hoskinson, a burly, forceful man from Chicago, with a blunt way of speaking and a ready, gap-toothed smile. He had been working as a CIA analyst on the subcontinent, until a drinking buddy of his, Alexander Haig, became Kissinger’s deputy and offered him a South Asia job. Hoskinson, in his late thirties, snapped up the precious opportunity to work at the White House. It was by far the most important post of his life. “Henry is in the genius category, as a diplomatist, as a historian,” he says with undiluted admiration.
Kissinger hired his own staff with an eye for the very best talent, not for right-wing ideology. At the same time, he was an impossible person to work for. “I keep them in a state of exhaustion,” he once joked. Hoskinson says, “He could be totally unreasonable.” He would berate the staff, sometimes yelling at them. “He traumatized you sometimes. You’re a young guy and you get smacked around so much.” Hoskinson would go to Haig for reassurance. “I said, ‘He doesn’t like anything I do.’ Haig said, ‘That means he loves you.’ Everyone on that staff had a tempestuous relationship with Henry.” He remembers, “He could be quite volatile. You always had to weigh how things were going to go with Henry.” Still, he says, “It led to great respect by the staff. There were a few who dropped by the wayside, who couldn’t take the whippings. It was the highlight of my career.”29