WASHINGTON, June 15 –A Princeton University expert on Latin America says he has abandoned plans to become Foreign Affairs magazine’s book reviewer covering the Western Hemisphere, citing accusations that the journal bowed to pressure from Henry A. Kissinger and his associates.
The expert, Jeremy Adelman, agreed in May to take on the reviews later this month when Kenneth Maxwell leaves his post as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs. But Mr. Adelman said that he had second thoughts after reading accounts of a dispute between Mr. Maxwell and his editors and senior officials of the council.
Mr. Maxwell resigned in protest on May 13 after reviewing ”The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability,” by Peter Kornbluh. His review angered Mr. Kissinger, the secretary of state when Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973, and William Rogers, the former assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs under Mr. Kissinger. (Mr. Rogers is now a vice president of the consulting firm Kissinger Associates.) Mr. Rogers contended that the review exaggerated United States responsibility for the downfall of the Chilean president Salvador Allende.
Foreign Affairs then published an exchange between Mr. Rogers and Mr. Maxwell, and gave Mr. Rogers the last word in a subsequent letter. Though the journal customarily lets authors reply to criticism, it has refused to publish Mr. Maxwell’s rebuttal, in what he charges is a bid to silence debate over United States policy on Mr. Kissinger’s watch. Mr. Adelman said that soon after accounts of the dispute appeared in The Nation, The New York Times and the Folha de Sao Paulo, a Brazilian daily, he received numerous e-mail messages , some attacking him as ”a scab.” His resignation was reported on Sunday in the Folha and in another Brazilian daily, O Globo.
”While I still think this is an important position and the magazine is important, the amount of time it would take for me to explain the situation to the world of Latin America experts, the world that I inhabit, was too great,” he said. He added that the editor of Foreign Affairs, James F. Hoge Jr., was quoted in the Folha as saying that Peter G. Peterson, the council’s chairman, had called to advise him that the review had upset Mr. Kissinger and others. Mr. Hoge acknowledged the call yesterday, but denied that Mr. Kissinger had pressured him. He demanded that Mr. Maxwell produce proof of his accusation. He said that he did not print Mr. Maxwell’s final rebuttal because both sides had had their say.
Mr. Maxwell said that he had learned of the pressure in discussions with Mr. Hoge and had kept records of those conversations.
Theresa Cimino, an assistant to Mr. Kissinger, said he was traveling and could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Hoge said that he was surprised at Professor Adelman’s resignation, and that the professor — not Foreign Affairs — had bowed to pressure.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Section E; Column 5; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 6, 503 wordsThe Maxwell Affairby Scott Sherman
The Nation, June 21, 2004 (posted on-line June 3)
Last November Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of theCouncil on Foreign Relations, published a review of The PinochetFile: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, a newbook by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’sChile Documentation Project. Written by the council’s chief LatinAmerica expert, Kenneth Maxwell, the review upset two formerstatesmen who figure prominently in the book and who also happen tobe influential actors at the council: Henry Kissinger and hislongtime associate William Rogers. In May, after an acrimoniousexchange between Rogers and Maxwell in Foreign Affairs–an exchangethat Maxwell insists was abruptly curtailed as a result of pressurefrom Kissinger and Rogers–Maxwell resigned in protest from thecouncil. His departure raises questions about intellectual freedomat the council; about editorial independence at Foreign Affairs,where Maxwell spent eleven years as Western Hemisphere bookreviewer; and about Kissinger’s and Rogers’s influence on thenation’s pre-eminent foreign policy think tank.
Maxwell’s review, “The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile,1973,” was not a slashing polemic but a measured essay on Americanintervention in Chile in the 1970s. Maxwell expressed certainreservations about The Pinochet File, yet acknowledged that Kornbluhhad assembled a dossier that “significantly amplifies” our historicalknowledge of the campaign against President Salvador Allende, who wasoverthrown by a military coup on September 11, 1973. Halfway throughthe essay, the reviewer directed his ire at the Nixon-erapolicy-makers–Kissinger chiefly among them–who contributed toAllende’s demise: “What is truly remarkable,” Maxwell noted, “is theeffort–the resources committed, the risks taken, and theskullduggery employed–to bring a Latin American democracy down, andthe meager efforts since to build democracy back up. Left to theirown devices, the Chileans might just have found the good sense toresolve their own deep-seated problems. Allende might have fallen byhis own weight, victim of his own incompetence, and not become atragic martyr to a lost cause.”
Maxwell’s essay prompted a smoldering letter to the editor fromRogers, who worked under Kissinger at the State Department from 1974to 1977 and is currently vice chair of Kissinger Associates. “Themyth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende ofChile in 1973 lives,” Rogers proclaimed in the January/Februaryissue. “There is…no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists. It islovingly nurtured by the Latin American left and refreshed from timeto time by contributions to the literature like Peter Kornbluh’s ThePinochet File and Kenneth Maxwell’s review of that book.”
Allende’s fall, Rogers declared, was the result of “his disastrouseconomic policies, his attack on Chile’s democratic institutions[and] the wave of popular resentment that swept the Chilean militaryto power.” Rogers hastened to minimize US involvement in two highlycontroversial matters, both of which figure prominently in ThePinochet File: the murder of Chilean Gen. René Schneider in1970 and Operation Condor, a state-sponsored terror network set upby Pinochet that from 1975 to 1977 targeted critics all over theWestern Hemisphere and Europe. Among them was Orlando Letelier,Pinochet’s most prominent opponent in the United States, who wasmurdered, along with American Ronni Moffitt, by a car bomb inWashington, DC, in 1976.
Round one of the Maxwell-Rogers exchange concluded with a rejoinderby Maxwell in the same issue. “William Rogers overreaches,” Maxwellwrote. “To claim that the United States was not actively involved inpromoting Allende’s downfall in the face of overwhelming evidence tothe contrary verges on incredulity.” Maxwell went on to address avery delicate matter–Kissinger’s and Rogers’s knowledge of OperationCondor. Maxwell (following Kornbluh) insisted that the murder ofOrlando Letelier, in particular, was “a tragedy that might have beenprevented,” since “other assassinations of opposition figures plannedby Condor in Europe were in fact prevented because the United Statestipped off the governments in question (France and Portugal) inadvance.” Closing his reply, Maxwell upped the ante: “Somecountries,” he wrote, “have established ‘truth commissions’ to lookinto such matters. In the United States, however, the record has beenextracted painfully, like rotten teeth.”
Rogers returned to the battlefield with a second letter in theMarch/April issue, in which he accused Maxwell of “bias,” dismissedthe notion that Letelier’s murder could have been prevented anddenied that he bore any responsibility for the crimes committed underCondor. Rogers’s tone suggested that Maxwell had crossed an invisibleline: “One would hope at least,” Rogers ominously concluded, “thatMaxwell’s views are understood to be his own and not those of theCouncil on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow.”
On February 4, Maxwell had handed in a six-paragraph rebuttal toRogers’s second letter–in which he wrote, “Rogers cannot foreverprovide a shield for his boss to hide behind”–but it never appeared.High-ranking sources at the council say that Kissinger and Rogersapplied enormous pressure, directly and indirectly, on ForeignAffairs editor James Hoge–and on the council itself–to close offthe debate. Neither Rogers nor Kissinger is a stranger to theinstitution: Rogers served three terms on its board of directors;Kissinger has been affiliated off and on since 1955, and he currentlyco-chairs a task force on US policy toward Europe. Maxwell notes thatthe institution’s new president, Richard Haass, who succeeded LeslieGelb in 2003, “is very much anxious to engage him.” Maxwell declinesto elaborate on the specific ways Kissinger and Rogers exerted theirinfluence, but he does allow that “they know how to act in thesematters, and they bring heavy guns to bear.”
When his internal lobbying to get his rebuttal published failed,Maxwell felt compelled to act. On May 13 he resigned from the counciland from his post as book reviewer for Foreign Affairs. Theresignation was instantly accepted by Haass. In his resignationletter to Hoge, Maxwell wrote, “I have no personal ax to grind inthis matter, but I do have a historian’s obligation to the accuracyof the historical record. The Council’s current relationship with Mr.Kissinger evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about hisactions as a public figure. This I want no part of.”
Hoge denies receiving pressure from Kissinger. “I never talked toHenry Kissinger about this at all,” he says, “nor has anybody elsetold me that Henry had a view one way or the other.” But Hogecertainly felt the sting of Rogers’s fury. After round one of theexchange, Hoge received a call from Rogers, who recoiled fromMaxwell’s suggestion that he was directly (or indirectly)complicitous in Operation Condor. Hoge urged Rogers to send a secondletter, and–curiously–assured him that the letter would concludethe exchange. Hoge then contacted Maxwell. “I called Ken,” Hogerecalls, “and said, ‘This is what Rogers thinks you are implying.’And he said, ‘That is what I’m implying.’ And I said, ‘Ken, that putsme in an awkward position, because it’s informed surmise that you arebasing this on, frankly. If there are hard facts to this, they haveyet to come out.'” Evidently Hoge does not read the books reviewed inhis own journal, because as Maxwell pointed out in the unpublishedreply, “Washington’s knowledge about the Condor system and itsactivities during this period has been cautiously and carefullydocumented in John Dinges’s book The Condor Years, especiallychapters 7-10, and in chapter 6 of Kornbluh’s Pinochet File.” Hogedeclined to explain why he promised Rogers–and not Maxwell, hisjournal’s own Latin America expert–the last word in the exchange. “Adifferent call might have been made,” Hoge admits. (Kissinger andRogers did not return phone calls, and Haass was traveling andunavailable for comment.)
Leaving the council, and vacating an endowed chair, was not an easydecision for Maxwell, a soft-spoken, English-born, 63-year-oldhistorian who has taught at Yale, Princeton and Columbia and whowrites for The New York Review of Books. “The burden was on me tomake a decision on an issue of principle,” he says. “That’s nevereasy. It’s easier to acquiesce. But in this case I didn’t feel likeacquiescing.” On July 1 he will become a senior fellow at the DavidRockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.
Oddly enough, Maxwell’s departure coincides with the release of a20,000-page cache of Henry Kissinger’s telephone conversations fromthe 1970s, some of which concern Chile. “We didn’t do it,” Kissingerinformed President Nixon after President Allende was overthrown byGeneral Pinochet. “I mean we helped them.” In light of these newtranscripts, Maxwell’s call for an American “truth commission” onChile seems more appropriate than ever. But don’t expect to find thedetails in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040621&s=sherman
http://www.johndinges.com/condor/CFR%20NYT%20pieces.htm
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