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  Indians, acclaiming Kennedy, imagined being rid of Nixon. As if Kennedy were already president, Gandhi threw him a rare lunch in his honor, a tribute usually reserved for a head of state. At the Parliament, Atal Bihari Vajpayee—himself a future prime minister—said, “I would like to ask on behalf of many Members of Parliament when Senator Kennedy is going to become the President of the United States.” Kennedy laughed. “I like this kind of question.”23

  The senator’s staff, exhilarated by the crowds, had the same thought. Back in Delhi, the senator took a break from the stifling August heat with a swim at the U.S. embassy’s pool. Nevin Scrimshaw remembers one of his aides looking admiringly at an exceedingly fit Kennedy on the diving board. The staffer, seemingly confident that Chappaquiddick would blow over, said that Kennedy was likely to become president.

  Kennedy—about as far as one could get from Chappaquiddick but still mindful of it—was not so sure. Once, while he was being driven toward a refugee camp, his convoy turned left, and soon came to a halt by the side of the road. Scrimshaw remembers that an Indian official came back to Kennedy’s car and stuck his head in through the window. Kennedy asked, “Why are we stopped?” The Indian official said, “Wrong turn.” Under his breath, Kennedy muttered, “Story of my life.”

  “AN AMERICA THAT SUPPORTS MILITARY REPRESSION”

  At the White House, Kissinger worried that “when Kennedy comes back, he will blow the roof off.” He was right: the senator returned to Washington, haunted by what he had seen, to deliver a jeremiad against Nixon.24

  He had just witnessed, he told the Beltway crowd at the National Press Club, “the most appalling tide of human misery in modern times.” He unsparingly told of hearing “stories of atrocities, of slaughter, of looting and burning.” He was harrowed by seeing listless infants with “skin hanging loosely in folds from their tiny bones,” children with “legs and feet swollen from edema and malnutrition, limp in the arms of their mothers,” and, worst of all, “the corpse of the child who died just the night before.” He could not forget “the look on the face of a child paralyzed from the waist down, never to walk again; or a child quivering in fear on a mat in a small tent still in shock from seeing his parents, his brothers and his sisters executed before his eyes; or the anxiety of a 10-year-old girl out foraging for something to cover the body of her baby brother who had died of cholera a few moments before our arrival.”

  This, he thundered, was what the United States was supporting. This misery should “particularly distress Americans, since it is our military hardware—our guns and tanks and aircraft delivered over a decade—which are contributing substantially to the suffering.” While Nixon and Kissinger often privately spoke of not getting involved, Kennedy pointed out that the United States was actually intervening on Yahya’s side. “You may say that we have no business getting involved—that we cannot police the world,” he said. “That may be true. But the cold fact is that we already are involved in East Bengal. Our guns are involved. Our money—invested over two decades of economic assistance— is involved.” He blasted the White House’s fixation on maintaining leverage over Yahya: “Why, if we have the leverage to influence the government of Pakistan, must our great nation assist in this shabby and shameful enterprise?”

  While the Nixon administration prided itself on giving India more aid than the rest of the world combined, that “pride is quickly dispelled by the vastly greater burden now being carried single-handedly by the government and people of India.” Measured against the reality of the refugee camps, “we realize how little the outside world is really doing, and how paltry the American contribution really is.” And Kennedy wanted to treat the causes, not the results—to “stop the use of U.S. arms which produce the refugees and civilian victims that we then must help support in India.”

  Hitting the Nixon administration where it hurt, he turned to Vietnam. There, the United States was trying to prop up a purported democracy, while “in East Bengal—less than 2000 miles from Saigon— we ignore the results of a free election only to help a group of generals suppress an electoral mandate and, in the process, to subvert all the principles for which we have sacrificed so much for so long.” He declared, “Unfortunately, the face of America today in South Asia is not much different from its image over the past years in Southeast Asia. It is the image of an America that supports military repression and fuels military violence. It is the image of an America comfortably consorting with an authoritarian regime.”

  Radicalized by his personal experience, he demanded that Nixon himself pressure Yahya, and end all arms shipments and economic aid to “a regime that continues to violate the most basic principles of humanity. We must demonstrate to the generals of West Pakistan and to the peoples of the world that the United States has a deep and abiding revulsion of the monumental slaughter that has ravaged East Bengal.” And then he concluded with famous verses from the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; / Where knowledge is free; / Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls … / Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”25

  Kennedy’s words were greeted rapturously in India. The Indian Express wrote, “Like his brothers John and Robert before him, Edward Kennedy now symbolises the essential liberalism and deep humanity of the American spirit.” His speech was “the voice of America’s conscience.”26

  The White House, stung, put out word that they agreed there should be more humanitarian aid. Nixon and Kissinger, worried about Kennedy, decided to ask Congress for more money—about $100 million of relief aid for East Pakistan for the coming fiscal year, and $150 million for the refugees in India. On top of $89 million already promised, this was a substantial sum, but dwarfed by the actual amounts that the White House estimated were really needed annually: as much as $315 million for East Pakistan, and $830 million for eight million refugees in India. (Even so, George Shultz, the White House budget director, who would be Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, objected that it was “a hell of a lot of money,” and had to be steamrollered by Kissinger.)27

  Harold Saunders, Kissinger’s senior aide, called Kennedy “demagogic” and bristled at his “innuendo that the Administration is largely responsible for Yahya’s policies.” The United States, Saunders wrote, should concentrate on the refugees, not on winning autonomy for East Pakistan. Kennedy met with Kissinger on September 8, but there is no White House record of what they said, except that Kennedy claimed that Mujib was probably already dead, which Kissinger found ridiculous.28

  Saunders was put to work drafting speeches for Republican lawmakers, lambasting Kennedy as hysterical and one-sided. The White House’s surrogates included Gerald Ford, the next president, then a Michigan representative, and Bob Dole, the Kansas senator who would be the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. Dole hit every White House note: lauding Nixon’s refugee relief, downplaying arms shipments, and declaring that “in the name of morality” the United States must “not cut ourselves off from the only people—the Government of Pakistan—that have the capacity to change the immediate situation.”29

  From Delhi, Keating, the U.S. ambassador who had lost his Senate seat to Robert Kennedy, warned the White House that Ted Kennedy “will probably continue hammering at this until November 1972”—the presidential election. “He and his staff evidently think they have an issue.” Nixon said that American public opinion had been duped by India: “there’s a huge public relations campaign here. Many of our friends in the other party, and including, I must say, some of the nuts in our own party, soft-heads, have jumped on, have completely bought the Indian line. And India has a very great propaganda line.”30

  All this time, Kennedy was relentless. On the Senate floor, he repeatedly accused Pakistan of genocide. Since his trip, he said, “nearly a million more East Bengalis has found it necessary to flee inhuman conditions and truly genocidal acts of their government.”31

  K
ennedy produced a bombshell for the White House. The Nixon administration had publicly declared that arms shipments to Pakistan had ended, and specifically promised that nothing had moved from Pentagon stocks. Not so. Kennedy had congressional investigators check up on whether U.S. weaponry was still getting to Pakistan; they found that more than $2 million worth of equipment had been released from the Pentagon’s depots.32

  The worst offender was the U.S. Air Force, which kept on supplying some $2.4 million worth of spares—70 percent of that lethal—to the Pakistan Air Force until July. The U.S. Army and Navy had also been releasing lethal spare parts for Pakistan. Harold Saunders and Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger’s aides, were chagrined, and skeptical that this had happened by accident. They wrote to Kissinger, “What this boils down to is that, allowing for shipment delays and expiration of licenses, probably at least half of the $3.8 million shipped to Pakistan should never have been released under the ground rules which we imposed on ourselves and made public.”33

  By now, Kennedy did not believe a word that the Nixon administration said about Pakistan. He introduced a bill authorizing $250 million to alleviate the ongoing lethal deprivation among the refugees in India, calling the administration’s current efforts “inexcusably slow” and far outstripped by the actual needs. India counted 1.76 million refugee children under eight years old, and Kennedy’s team—joined with Nevin Scrimshaw and a leading development expert at Princeton—calculated that at least three hundred thousand children desperately needed treatment for malnutrition. At first, they estimated, hundreds of children had been dying of hunger each day, then thousands, and now forty-three hundred daily. Without emergency relief, they argued, as many as two hundred thousand young children would have perished by the end of the year.34

  Kennedy declared, “Nothing is more clear, or easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror—and its genocidal consequences—launched by the Pakistan army on the night of March 25th.” Invoking the Holocaust, he said that Hindus were being specifically targeted, “systematically slaughtered, and, in some places, painted with yellow patches marked ‘H.’ ” He blamed the Nixon administration for much of this: “America’s heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal.”35

  Chapter 16

  “We Really Slobbered over the Old Witch”

  Nobody in the White House could claim not to know the horrors that had been visited upon East Pakistan. In a major report in September, the CIA guessed that “some 200,000 or more residents of the area have been killed,” and noted that East Pakistan had experienced “one of the largest and most rapid population transfers in modern times.”

  The CIA had a blunt explanation for this “incredible” migration: “many if not most of the Hindus fled for fear of their lives.” Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, Yahya’s military governor, evidently thought he could quickly frighten the Bengalis into submission. The Pakistan army, the CIA noted, seemed to have singled out Hindus as targets.

  Although the CIA refrained from crying genocide, it did insist this was an ethnic campaign, with 80 percent—or possibly even 90 percent— of the refugees being Hindus. So far, out of eight million refugees, over six million were Hindus, and many more might follow—ending perhaps only when East Pakistan had no more Hindus left. Yahya’s recent efforts to curtail such attacks had been of little use in a “virulent atmosphere” where loyalists got used to persecuting the Hindu minority.1

  Even with Archer Blood gone, the Dacca consulate warned of persecution of Hindus in the Mymensingh area, and fresh waves of Hindus fleeing to India. The locals said there was widespread rape. This was confirmed by Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who, interviewing refugees in India, found that almost all of them were Hindus, who said that they were still specifically hounded by the Pakistan army. Schanberg remembers, “There were stories about rape by the Pakistani army, and those were true. Story after story. It was quite clear this had really happened.”2

  As a respected U.S. development official reported, the Pakistan army, driven by anti-Hindu ideology, was clearing East Pakistan of Hindus. Even Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan, the senior military man ruling East Pakistan, agreed with this U.S. official’s assessment that some 80 percent of the Hindus had left East Pakistan. Off the record, the Pakistani general admitted there were roughly six million refugees, and that another million and a half would eventually flee into India—roughly the number of Hindus still remaining in East Pakistan.3

  UNLEASHING CHINA

  Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger stood firm behind Pakistan, with China on their minds. “I think we ought to toughen a little bit on Peking,” Kissinger said. “If we screw Pakistan too outrageously, that really—and if a war starts there, that really could blow up everything.” Nixon feared what a war might do for his upcoming visit to China.4

  Kissinger warned the president that if China decided that the United States was trying to “split off part of Pakistan in the name of self-determination,” that would be an unacceptable precedent “for Taiwan and Tibet in Peking’s eyes.” Nixon now wanted “a big, big, big package” of humanitarian aid to Pakistan, which, Kissinger thought, would impress China. Despite the mounting pressure from Congress, Nixon wanted China to know that he was still “standing firm for Pakistan.”5

  Thus on August 16, Kissinger went to the Chinese embassy in Paris to hammer out details for Nixon’s upcoming trip to Beijing. Wanting to showcase how resolute the United States was as an ally of Pakistan, he instead found himself forced to explain the unwelcome restraints imposed on him by the U.S. democratic system, especially the press and Congress. “Indian propaganda is extremely skillful and the opposition party in the United States, which controls Congress, is completely on the side of Indian propaganda,” Kissinger said. “They make it next to impossible to continue military supplies to Pakistan.” He asked China, which was unconstrained by the hassles of a democratic legislature, to pick up the slack. Still, he said, the United States would not let India “humiliate Pakistan.” While asking China to encourage Pakistan to defuse India’s pretext for war by getting refugees home, Kissinger pledged to make no public statements that could embarrass Pakistan’s government.6

  Using a line from Samuel Hoskinson, Kissinger once wrote to Nixon, “Above all we must avoid being forced to choose between our policy toward the government of 700 million Chinese and over 600 million Indians and Bengalis.” But the White House had clearly chosen. Later, when facing criticism that they were sacrificing India for China, Nixon was incredulous. “Sacrificing India? For Christ sakes.” Kissinger said, “Mr. President, there’s nothing to sacrifice in India to begin with.” “Of course!” agreed Nixon.7

  Nixon and Kissinger asked not just what they could do for China, but what China could do for them. Their new relationship with the People’s Republic brought radical possibilities. They could, they realized, use China to scare India out of attacking Pakistan—or, if war came, they could ask China to move its troops to the Indian border, threatening to embroil India in a war against two enemies at once.

  This was a daring realpolitik gambit that Metternich himself might have admired. There was an undeniable strategic logic to it—despite the sheer audacity of one democracy trying to pit the People’s Liberation Army against another democracy. This would be a complete turnaround from the U.S. position the last time that China went to war against India, back in 1962, when the United States had helped India defend itself.8

  It would also be a total reversal of Kissinger’s own solemn promises to India, made during his Delhi trip in July. Indian officials—whose direst fear was a Chinese attack—had been hugely relieved to get Kissinger’s pledges that the United States would back India against any Chinese saber rattling. In Delhi, Kissinger had personally made such assurances to Indira Gandhi herself, as well as to P. N. Haksar, the foreign minister, and the defense minister.9

  Kissinger gradually warmed up to the idea of unleashing
China against India. Impressed by his firsthand experience of Zhou Enlai’s hatred for India, he believed that the only way that India could lose a war with Pakistan would be if China joined in. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later suggested that India might have to divert five or six divisions to the Chinese border, offsetting India’s massive advantage over Pakistan in ground troops. At the White House, Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, planted the seed in Nixon’s mind: “Despite all their brave talk about being able to defend against the Chinese and fighting on two fronts against Pakistan, the Indians are still haunted by the 1962 humiliation.”10

  In August, Kissinger warily told Nixon, “At this stage in our China exercise we would be presented with excruciating choices if the Chinese were to attack India following an outbreak of Indo-Pakistani hostilities.” Kissinger’s aides, without his unfettered ingenuity, were worrying about preventing China from attacking India, rather than encouraging it. The State Department, which wanted to offer military help to India if China invaded, was even more in the dark. So was the American public, almost half of whom would have wanted to send supplies or U.S. troops to help India if it was attacked by communists.11

  India’s officials had more paranoid imaginations. They wondered what mysterious understandings Kissinger might have secured behind closed doors in Beijing. Back in January, the R&AW had secretly concluded that China was unlikely to fight for Pakistan, but expected that if India and Pakistan went to war, China would “adopt a threatening posture on the Sino-Indian border and even stage some border incidents and clashes.” This, the R&AW warned, could pin down Indian troops, keeping them away from fighting against Pakistan. In June, Swaran Singh, the foreign minister, had feared that China might fight India directly or “keep us busy on the borders and tie up our troops.”12