A fantastically well-reported and well-researched account of a forgotten dark moment in post-WW2 US foreign policy. Dark in the sense of fraught with evil and tragedy, but also in the sense that the moment was murky and full of ambiguity.
Above everything else, it's an enlightening portrait of the mechanics of highest-level foreign policy: how important personal relationships are, how dependent policy and even war between giant nations can be on whether two or three or four individuals trust each other. And also, how easy it is to put blinders on and do a bunch of bad stuff when you have a huge goal in mind. Nixon and Kissinger end up looking like callous, racist assholes, but throughout the book you can see their reasoning. And it is not fundamentally bad reasoning, in its way. They wanted the opening to China, and they settled on General Yahya Khan. Nixon liked him and hated Indira Gandhi, despite the fact that Yahya was a brutal moron. And Yahya played his role well. The opening worked and was a high point of Nixon's presidency. The fact that working toward that end helped set the US firmly against any kind of intervention or even light pressure on Pakistan to stop systematically massacring hundreds of thousands of its own citizens entered Nixon and Kissinger's consciousness only as an annoyance.
Meanwhile, the astoundingly-named Consul General Archer Blood and his eponymous telegram are a window into what can be done -- and what can't -- by individuals with a very different set of values and a very different perspective from the big guns at the top.
I haven't even gotten to the fascinating peek into Gandhi's government. Suffice it to say that I learned a lot.
Above everything else, it's an enlightening portrait of the mechanics of highest-level foreign policy: how important personal relationships are, how dependent policy and even war between giant nations can be on whether two or three or four individuals trust each other. And also, how easy it is to put blinders on and do a bunch of bad stuff when you have a huge goal in mind. Nixon and Kissinger end up looking like callous, racist assholes, but throughout the book you can see their reasoning. And it is not fundamentally bad reasoning, in its way. They wanted the opening to China, and they settled on General Yahya Khan. Nixon liked him and hated Indira Gandhi, despite the fact that Yahya was a brutal moron. And Yahya played his role well. The opening worked and was a high point of Nixon's presidency. The fact that working toward that end helped set the US firmly against any kind of intervention or even light pressure on Pakistan to stop systematically massacring hundreds of thousands of its own citizens entered Nixon and Kissinger's consciousness only as an annoyance.
Meanwhile, the astoundingly-named Consul General Archer Blood and his eponymous telegram are a window into what can be done -- and what can't -- by individuals with a very different set of values and a very different perspective from the big guns at the top.
I haven't even gotten to the fascinating peek into Gandhi's government. Suffice it to say that I learned a lot.
