The Kissinger Exception

“What if the famous, the powerful and the prominent, in a word the victors, were subject to the same judgment of law applied to the defeated war criminals tried at Nuremberg? That is the premise Martin Andersen tests in this book, whose heart is a series of international narratives framed as legal briefs that marshal the known facts about the crimes of Henry Kissinger. Its argument is that the world class reputation, Nobel Prize notwithstanding, of the man credited with revolutionizing the Cold War geopolitical order is not—should not be—a shield of impunity from international human rights prosecution. The book combines the wisdom of philosophical reflection with the rigor of investigative journalism. It is a monumental achievement of law and morality.”—John Dinges, Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor emeritus of International Journalism at Columbia University, and the author of The Cóndor Years and Chile in Their Hearts

“I want to write, now, exactly about the pornography of power. In South America today, the hidden resting-places of los desaparecidos are being found all the time. New and democratic governments, assisted by principled lawyers and judges and forensic investigators, are disinterring and identifying the maimed and twisted corpses of men and women, and of boys and girls, who were lost to their friends and families about a quarter of a century ago. (The critical resource for this and the rest of the story of Argentina is Martin Edwin Andersen’s 1993 book, Dossier Secreto.)”—Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair

“The greatest conundrum of American foreign policy in the 20th and early 21st centuries is how a man with so much blood on his hands, from Cambodia to Bangladesh, from Indonesia to Argentina, was treated for decades as the fount of all wisdom by political leaders of both parties. Martin Anderson has studied Henry Kissinger’s career for longer and more deeply than any other journalist, and this brilliantly researched book shows in painful detail how Kissinger transgressed every moral and legal norm that supposedly guides this nation’s conduct in the wider world.”—George Black, author of The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam