The Blood Telegram
Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

Bad Blood

This is a bad book. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary J. Bass, covers an interesting and terrible period in South Asia, and events that were closely intertwined with shifts in superpower and great-power relations of epochal importance. And when the author is not grinding the axe with which he wishes to decapitate the reputations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as architects and executants of American foreign policy, it is often somewhat interesting. But narratively, it never rises above a chronology and is expressionlessly presented apart from the relentlessly repeated effort to portray Nixon and Kissinger as, in the words of the famous diplomatic dispatch that gives the book its title, "morally bankrupt." As a history of the run-up to the India–Pakistan war of 1971, and of the birth of Bangladesh, it is an adequate and workmanlike account, but every paragraph is tainted by the author's obsessive desire to blame all the ills of a very troubled part of the world on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The period covered is 1970 to 1971, from the Pakistani election that elevated Mujibur Rahman's Bengali (East Pakistan) secessionist party through the war between India and Pakistan and the division of Pakistan into two countries. The intervening period saw increasing agitation in East Pakistan, Pakistani president General Yahya Khan's facilitation of the Sino-American rapprochement and Henry Kissinger's secret preparatory trip to Beijing, as well as the Pakistani leader's repression in East Pakistan. The principal events of this time are well-known, and the author, outside of his basic thesis that Nixon and Kissinger were genocidists, is doing something useful to the extent that he is actually shedding light on murky areas—particularly the duplicity of Indira Gandhi, India's formidable prime minister. The author, a knowledgeable professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, certainly does not hide, though he somewhat underplays, Mrs. Gandhi's desire to dismember Pakistan, including the rump state of West Pakistan after the severance of East Pakistan.

Astonishing achievement though the British Indian Empire was—where never more than 100,000 British governed 200–500 million people for two centuries in what are now seven countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan)—it set up an India in 1947 unsustainably partitioned between Hindu and Muslim regional majorities. The British left after the entire subcontinent had become a powder keg that their traditional methods of governing—by placating, cajoling, over-awing, and generally massaging the immensely complex network of local authorities—couldn't be played out any longer, and they were left with no choice but to cut and run. They did this with as much dignity and apparent continuity as Winston Churchill's protégé, the cousin of King Edward VIII and King George VI, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, could muster. The result was a civil war in which more than 12 million people fled their homes and more than 500,000 people died. The most prominent victim was the father of independence, Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, assassinated by a sectarian fanatic on January 30, 1947. (He was not related to Indira Gandhi, who was, however, the daughter of Gandhi's chief political ally, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru, Indira, and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, governed between them for thirty-seven of India's first forty-two years, and Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, is still the president of the governing Congress Party which Nehru founded.)

India and Pakistan regarded each other with morbid suspicion and hatred from the first days of their independence. They quarreled violently over the mountainous territory of Kashmir and Jammu, and had not composed any of their differences when the events recounted in this book began. The chief points the author tries to make are that Nixon and Kissinger chose a Pakistani channel to China over Romanian, French, and other possibilities because of American political affection for Yahya Khan, and for authoritarian militarists in general; that they could have pursued their China strategy while taking a much stronger line opposite Yahya's repressive policies in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); that they besmirched American honor by not doing more to stop the violence in East Pakistan; and that they bear the chief responsibility for the pitiful fate of about ten million refugees who fled the Pakistani army in East Pakistan, as well as general responsibility for the subsequent failings of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh.

All of this is nonsense. As Winston Lord—who was an aide to Kissinger at the time and a sinologist, and accompanied Kissinger and Nixon on their first visits to China (and was later ambassador to China and Assistant Secretary of State)—has written in a public letter to Politico, the Chinese rebuffed or ignored approaches that were made by the Nixon administration via Romania and France, presumably because they did not wish to deal with a Soviet or NATO ally in such a matter, and expressed a clear and strong preference for the Pakistani channel. There was no realistic option but to abide by the express preference of the Chinese government. Bass peremptorily recognizes that the reopening of relations with China after a complete shutdown of twenty-two years was a significant event, but determinedly downplays the significance of it at this time when the United States was trying to execute a complete withdrawal from Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, while the Soviet Union was threatening China, and there were repeated Sino–Soviet border incidents of highly explosive potential.

Bass makes no reference at all to the overall great-power context in which Nixon and Kissinger were operating. In 1966 in Manila, President Lyndon Johnson and the South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu had agreed on an offer of withdrawal of all non-indigenous forces from South Vietnam. If then the North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh had had the slightest interest in merely reunifying (which it never really had been) Vietnam, he would have taken the offer, waited until six months after the Americans had gone, and then reinvaded the South. The U.S. would not have reinserted ground forces, and he would have lived to return to Saigon. But he was determined to try to effect a decisive turn in the great struggle between Communism and the West, and militarily to defeat the United States. Every peace proposal Johnson and Nixon made was rejected contemptuously, and it was only when Nixon, in 1969, after the death of Ho Chi Minh, called for the support of the "Silent Majority" of Americans for a policy of withdrawal while handing the war over to the South Vietnamese, that any exit for the U.S. from Vietnam other than as a defeated power, became visible. To achieve this, Nixon had to disabuse China and Russia of their open-ended support for Ho's goal of defeating the U.S. (and then focus on promoting South Vietnam in its struggle with the Vietnamese Communists). And to achieve this, he had to intrude in the China–Soviet dispute as a stabilizing force, making a Soviet attack on China impossible in exchange for a less hostile stance from China, and settling down the worldwide competition with the USSR in exchange for avoidance of excessive U.S. intimacy with China.

It was a very intricate game, but one of complete integrity and responsibility, and the only channel through which to get it started was Pakistan. The American position was that some sort of negotiated self-determination with loose association for East Pakistan would come to pass if the Indians did not incite Bangladeshi violence. Yahya apparently believed that he was assured of Chinese and American support, and as East Pakistan began to disintegrate (a regiment defected, and the local independentist militia grew to 175,000 but India was also supplying it), tensions rose, Yahya began to impose military authority in brutal measure, Indian trans-border infiltration increased, and the American consul in the principal East Pakistani city of Dacca, Archer Blood, sent his famous telegram, with twenty-eight others in the American diplomatic mission in East Pakistan. And India countered the Sino–American rapprochement with conclusion of a defensive alliance with the USSR. The so-called Blood telegram went out on April 6 and decried the atrocities being committed by Yahya's army and said that the moral duty of the United States was to take a much stronger line against Yahya. Nixon's visit to China for early 1972 was announced in July 1971, so obviously the consul in Dacca knew nothing of the larger game, as Nixon's visit to China was announced over three months after the telegram. On what Blood and his colleagues were seeing, their position was reasonable, or at least understandable.

What Blood did not know was that Nixon and Kissinger had to deal with Pakistan to open relations with China, and were concerned that if that initiative collapsed, the Russians would then assist India not only in sundering Pakistan but also in an Indian assault on West Pakistan, leaving the United States rebuffed by China, humiliated by Russia, and with its principal ally in the region carved into pieces by an India that was now in a military alliance with the USSR. No one could reproach the consul in Dacca in April 1971 for not knowing this, but that doesn't excuse Professor Bass.

He spices his book with extreme strictures against Nixon and Kissinger: "racial animus," "killers," "slaughter," "genocide," "moral blindness." Taped presidential conversations are spliced and excerpted to paint Nixon and Kissinger as satanic cynics and almost crypto-Nazis. Much is made of "illegal" transfers of arms from friendly countries to embargoed Pakistan as it was threatened by India, although neither the constitutionality of congressional attempts to determine foreign policy nor the ability of the U.S. to prevent the use of weapons in Pakistani hands for even the most odious domestic purposes is clear. Bass is perfectly aware that the U.S. remonstrated with Yahya about East Pakistan, that it counted on an evolutionary change in that country, and that Gandhi, with the connivance of the Kremlin, was doing all she could to destroy Pakistan and was contemplating an assault on West Pakistan. Nixon was pledged to heavy assistance for the refugees, which he did produce, and to urging Pakistan onto the path of civilized internal conduct, which he also pursued. He and Kissinger also succeeded in opening relations with China (February–March 1972); in assisting, with U.S. air support alone, the South Vietnamese army to defeat the North Vietnamese and Vietcong decisively (April 1972); in sharply improving relations with the Soviet Union and negotiating and signing the greatest arms control agreement in world history (which was also beneficial to the United States as it ignored the great American technological advantage in multiple independently targeted warheads) (May 1972); and in completely detaching China and the Soviet Union from the more extreme ambitions of Hanoi to embarrass the United States (December 1972). Bass even holds against Nixon the fact that his deterrence of Gandhi from following up her easy victory in East Pakistan involved dispatching an aircraft carrier task force to the Indian Ocean. It worked, and that is why the United States has aircraft carriers. And nowhere does Bass explain what was "morally bankrupt" about deterring India from smashing West Pakistan with the blessings of the Kremlin.

As all the world knows, the subcontinent, since the end of the British Raj, has been a pretty rough-and-tumble political theater. Yahya's successor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed, and his executioner, General Zia ul-Haq, and his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, both of whom succeeded him, were assassinated, as were Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and Mujibur Rahman (and his wife, children, and the family dog). Gary Bass would have his readers believe that Nixon and Kissinger contributed materially to this grim sequence. They are spared nothing. The fact that Nixon and Kissinger were able to achieve what they did in 1971 and 1972, having inherited in 1969 a complete foreign policy wasteland and an apparently hopeless war from which 200 to 400 of the 550,000 American draftees engaged in it were returning dead every week, is not significantly compromised by the tragedy of Bangladesh. Nor was the honor of America. In all of the circumstances, the strategic and tactical decisions of the American leaders were correct and overwhelmingly successful, morally and otherwise.

Unfortunately, this book, which has been rapturously received in the more perfervid precincts of the American and British left, continues and amplifies the tendency to splenetic defamation of this book's two chief subjects. The American left has invested so much in the demonization of Nixon that it is becoming hysterical as the Watergate fable melts steadily; it is clear that there was no real evidence that Nixon committed any crimes and that there was no excuse for destroying one of the most successful administrations in American history. The defamer in chief, Bob Woodward, has been unmasked as a fiction-writer, from his dubious interview with an inaccessible and comatose William Casey in Veil, to his spurious biography of John Belushi, to the revelation that his own editor at The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, questioned what he and Bernstein were reporting about Watergate. To some extent, Henry Kissinger is suffering collateral damage from the left's deathbed carpet-bombing of Nixon, though Kissinger has his own haters, almost as crazed though not as numerous, and with a much more difficult target than the assassins of Nixon.

The goal-line stand of the retreating Nixonophobes is understandable as a defense of the mythology that has ennobled and enriched its authors, though it is contemptible and unrigorous (which is not to suggest that Nixon was without his faults). But the preoccupation with trying to tear down Kissinger is a more challenging pathology. It seems to be an infelicitous combination of prosecution of guilt by association (with Nixon), with the terminal peevishness and implacable death wish of the American left, partly hidden behind the ill-fitting disguise of a fatuous, otherworldly virtue. The whole process is made even more boring and irritating than it needs to be by this pedantic smoke-screen employed by the tendentious loopies of left and right, of trying to impress the unwary with herniating masses of footnotes to misleadingly cited sources.

The new day cannot be far off when reading serious books about some of America's greatest twentieth-century statesmen will not be like reading Koestler's indictment of Rubashov. Any perusal of this book cannot fail to increase impatience for a glimpse of that kindly light.

© 2026 Conrad Black