Things have come full circle in Chile and sundry thoughts on a famous US Statesman:

While I’m on the subject of Chile, I could note that things have recently come full circle with respect to the country’s politics. In 2006, for only the second time in the country’s history, Chile elected a Socialist President, Michelle Bachelet (see the above photo). And this Socialist candidate received a much stronger popular mandate than did Allende in 1970. Bachelet won 53.5% of the popular vote in the run-off election, defeating the ex-Senator and billionaire businessman Sebastian Peñera, who ran as the center-right candidate.

Bachelet’s election is notable not just because she ran as a Socialist candidate, albeit a moderate one who pledged to continue free market policies, while boosting social benefits to address the country’s staggering socio-economic inequality (Chile ranks near the top of the world in this area). Chile is still a very conservative place socially and the influence of the Catholic Church remains quite strong. Thus getting a woman elected as President of the country is pretty remarkable. And this particular woman is a separated mother of three and self-described agnostic to boot.

Bachelet’s father served as a high-ranking officer in the Chilean Air Force and was one of the few people in the military who supported Allende’s Government. Allende thus put him in charge of food distribution during the last chaotic year of his administration. Following the coup, Bachelet’s father was arrested for treason and then died of heart attack while in custody.

Bachelet and her mother were then arrested and taken, blindfolded, to the Villa Grimaldi, which was Santiago’s notorious secret detention center. There they were separated and tortured. Bachelet was 22 at that time. Thanks to sympathetic people in the military, she was able to join her brother in exile in Australia.

Bachelet then spent some years in East Germany, where she resumed and completed her medical studies and had her first child. When Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979 to practice medicine, she naturally became involved in the political opposition to General Pinochet’s dictatorship (the old buzzard's photo below).


In addition to being a fully qualified pediatrician and epidemiologist, Bachelet has studied military strategy. Indeed, during the 1990s she attended Chiles prestigious National Academy for Strategic and Policy Studies and graduated at the top of her class. Before becoming president, Bachelet served as Health and then Defense Minister in President Ricardo Lagos’s centrist government (Bachelet succeeded Lagos as President). And last but certainly not least, Bachelet is also multilingual. In addition to her native Spanish, she is fluent in Portaguese, German, English, and French.

In short, Michelle Bachelet is someone I’d be delighted to have running my country. Before doing this post, I’d known that she was Chile’s first woman president and a Socialist, but that was about it. After doing further research on Bachelet’s life and background for this post, I have to confess that she now ranks as one of my favorite women on the planet.

If Bachelet is one of my new heroes (or heroines), one of the main authors of her previous suffering, Henry Kissinger, has to rank as one of the public figures I most utterly and deeply loathe. In fact, I dislike Kissinger even more intensely than I dislike Richard Nixon.

To be sure, we now know from Haldeman’s diaries just how foul-mouthed, bigoted, and anti-Semetic Nixon really was. However, I’ve always felt that the President was in some ways a tragic figure. Here was a man who was intensely private, shy and awkward—you could say he was the antithesis of Bill Clinton—but was driven by his ambition to enter a profession which he tempermentally had absolutely no business being in.

Regarding Nixon’s awkwardness one story, which I believe comes from Ricahrd Reeves recent biography, says it all. During his first term, the President wanted to change the night-stand in the White House master bedroom. When discussing this matter with their wife, most husbands would tell their better half, “Hey honey, I’d like to change the nightstand in our bedroom.” Not Nixon: he wrote a memo to Pat saying something like, “RN would like to change the nightstand in the White House master bedroom”. Yes in these written communications, Nixon usually referred to himself in the third person, using the abbreviation “RN”.

I believe that Kissinger, by contrast, always was and remains up to this day a sneaky, conniving, power-hungry prick. This is a man whose operative philosophy could be summed up as “Kindness doesn’t get you very far on the dockyards of Marsielle”.

Kissinger’s oft-noted ruthlessness in dealing with colleagues pre-dated his time in the White House and State Department. He detested his boss at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, a courtly southern gentlemen scholar named Robert Bowie, who was very much Kissinger’s opposite in every way. The eminity between them, which was largely fueled by Kissinger’s arrogance, pettiness, and paranoia, became pathologically intense. Things got so bad that both men would ask their secretaries to check and see if the other was in the hallway before they went out to use the can.

Of course, Chileans like Bachelet were not the only victims of Kissinger’s obsession with acting tough in order to preserve US “credibility”. Over a million Vietnamese perished thanks to the intensive 1968-1974 US bombing of both the country, an action which simply delayed the inevitable collapse of the corrupt and rickety Thieu client regime.

Moreover, the US invasion of Cambodia was a big factor in both strengthening and radicalizing the Khemer Rogue. As William Shawcross argued long ago in his still seminal book, SIDESHOW, Nixon and Kissinger bear some responsibility for what was the worst auto-genocide in human history. A disclosure alert is in order here: a very close friend from my undergraduate USC days, Craig Etcheson, has been playing a key role in the war crimes tribunal currently underway in Phnom Penh against the surviving members of the Khemer Rogue leadership.

Finally, Kissinger’s tendency to see every conflict in the third world through the prism of the US-Soviet global rivalry led to the covert CIA intervention into post-colonial Angola. This happened during Kissinger’s final years in power and is not that well known—John Stockwell, who led the CIA effort on the ground, wrote an excellent book about it, IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES—but certainly ranks up there as one of the former Secretary of State’s major crimes.

This intervention, in which the US at one point inserted South African mercenaries into Angola, helped spawn a prolonged and bloody civil war. While the conflict came to an end some years, after the US backed UNITA rebel group finally threw in the towel, scores Angolans are still being killed and mained by landmines planted during the struggle.

Kissinger’s influence did wane some in the 1980s. According to a fascinating article that appeared recently in the February 12, 2009 issue VANITY FAIR INSERT by James Mann, President Ronald Reagan ignored both his and Nixon’s urgings to rebuff Mikhail Gorbachev’s overtures to the West. Both men forcefully argued that Gorbachev was a sham and not a genuine reformer. However, Reagan followed his instincts, which told him that the new Soviet leader was the real deal (he didn’t though “look into his soul” when they met!). I’ve never cared much for Reagan, but the Gipper really deserves a lot of credit here for helping to improve American-Russian relations at the end of the Cold War.

Unfortunately, Kissinger made something of comeback during the second Bush Administration. According to press reports, Kissinger’s strong advice to stay the course in Iraq carried a lot of weight among both senior Bush officials and the President. In offering his sage wisdom, Kissinger essentially reiterated the thinking in his infamous “Salt Peanuts” memo, which argued that quickly pulling out of Vietnam was like feeding the American people “salt peanuts”.

Fortunately, like Chile, the US has now recently undergone regime change. With the new Obama Administration, perhaps the malign influence of this Mestopholian character over US foreign policy and public life has finally come to an end. And not a moment too soon!!!