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| Kissinger Watch #14 - 5 | |
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| Oh, Henry / Boston Globe | |
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| Oh, Henry As Kissinger begins a 9/11 job, Eugene Jarecki's documentary takes him on as a war criminal By Loren King, Globe Correspondent, 12/8/2002 Thanksgiving week was a busy one for filmmakers Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney. Bill Moyers called. WBUR's ''The Connection'' called. During this time their well-received but hardly blockbuster documentary, ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger,'' transformed from simply controversial to buzzworthy. When President Bush announced Nov. 27 that Kissinger will lead an investigation into security lapses before the Sept. 11 attacks, ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger'' suddenly seemed prescient. Until the surprise announcement, the filmmakers say, despite solid reviews for the BBC-backed film, which opened in Boston on Friday, the mainstream media had largely refused to cover the documentary as a news story. This despite its biting assertions, backed by recently declassified documents, that the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner is - in the words of British journalist Christopher Hitchens, on whose 2001 book the film is based - a war criminal. ''The past always haunts present,'' says Gibney, an Emmy Award-winning documentary writer and producer who has made films for HBO and PBS's ''Frontline. '' ''Bush chose someone to lead a fact-finding committee who has dedicated his life to secrecy and to subterfuge.'' Jarecki, the film's director, has worked for the BBC and ''60 Minutes'' and last year directed his first feature, ''The Opponent,'' which will be released in 2003. ''The Kissinger appointment is a smug slap in the face to the victims of 9/11,'' Jarecki says. ''It's like putting Al Capone in charge of the IRS,'' he says. ''I'd like to ask Dr. Kissinger: Even if you don't believe that you committed [war crimes], you know that there are millions who believe you deceived the public and deceived Congress. A black cloud hovers over you. How could you bring that baggage into the sacred space of family grief?'' Strong words, but ''Trials of Henry Kissinger'' is strong stuff. So much so, in fact, that no American film or broadcast outlet wanted to finance the project. Despite being shunned by US producers, ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger'' premiered in New York in June as part of the annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and each screening quickly sold out. ''People were scalping tickets outside the theater. It was like Yankee Stadium,'' Gibney says. ''It gave us the idea that the film could be released theatrically.'' Indeed, First Run Features bought the rights to the film, and in October, it opened at New York's Film Forum, where it is still playing. It opened Friday in 120 US cities, and it will air on the Sundance Channel in March. Jarecki just returned from Amsterdam, where the film earned an award from Amnesty International, an honor that he says represents ''a vote of no confidence on the appointment of Dr. Kissinger'' to head the Sept. 11 committee. Taking from Hitchens's book, ''The Trial of Henry Kissinger,'' the film mounts a case that Richard Nixon's national security adviser orchestrated secret bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia and facilitated the 1973 CIA-led coup in Chile that led to the death of President Salvador Allende and the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The film asserts that in masterminding the coup, Kissinger arranged for the kidnapping of Rene Schneider, chief of the Chilean General Staff, an attempt that ended in Schneider's murder. To date, five countries have summoned Kissinger for questioning in connection with the Pinochet war crimes trial in London. The film presents disturbing evidence that Nixon and Kissinger ordered secret bombings in Cambodia, an event, the film charges, that led to the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. It also exposes Kissinger's role, as secretary of state under Gerald Ford, in the sale of US weapons to President Suharto of Indonesia, weapons that Kissinger apparently understood would be used to massacre civilians in East Timor. The film offers an A-list of commentators who worked closely with Kissinger or who covered his ascension from academic to international diplomat and improbable media darling: American journalist Seymour Hersh; British journalist William Shawcross, who wrote ''Sideshow,'' an account of the American bombing of Cambodia; Roger Morris, who worked under Kissinger at the National Security Council; and Kissinger biographer Walter Issacson. Kissinger declined to be interviewed. But in his defense, the film offers New York Times columnist William Safire and former general Alexander Haig. For Jarecki, whose father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and whose maternal grandparents escaped czarist Russia, the Kissinger film served as his coming of age. ''I grew up in the '70s, when Kissinger was seen by many as the model statesman and, for Jews in particular, as an immigrant success story,'' he says. The film explores Kissinger's boyhood in Germany and his family's flight from the Nazis in an attempt to personalize his career. ''My father took the path of a mistrust of power and the belief that a centralized government leads to tyranny,'' says Jarecki. ''Kissinger took the path that power was a sport, an art form, a way to ensure his survival.'' Jarecki, who studied stage direction at Princeton and New York University and became a filmmaker when his short, ''Season of the Lifterbees, '' won a host of film festival awards, finds it puzzling that even he, an educated American, had only cursory information about the international condemnation of Kissinger's roles in two administrations. It was just last year, when the French government summoned Kissinger for questioning in the Pinochet trial, that Jarecki became ''curious,'' he says, and began to read accounts of Kissinger's covert actions by Hersh, Shawcross, Issacson, and, finally, Hitchens's blistering brief. He also read the former secretary of state's memoirs. ''They hardly deal with these charges,'' Jarecki says. ''His sources are hidden in the Library of Congress with instructions that they be sealed until five years after his death. There is no respect for the truth. Our goal with the film was to bring these events into the present, into the court of public opinion, and let people judge for themselves.'' The Pinochet trial and a lawsuit filed against Kissinger by Schneider's family had already made ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger'' relevant to contemporary audiences, the filmmakers contend. But the Bush appointment turns up the glare on a film concerned with government secrecy, deception, and power lust. ''In the Nixon White House, abuse of power was excused because we were fighting communism. Now, Bush is echoing the Nixon era by claiming that a war on terrorism is an excuse to keep policies in the shadows,'' says Gibney. Jarecki says he promised his mother that his next project would be a ''feel-good movie.'' But that won't happen just yet. The making of ''The Trials of Henry Kissinger'' and the renewed interest in Kissinger has pushed Jarecki away from fiction for now. ''My heart is in documentary at the moment,'' he says. ''This is a time for truth.'' This story ran on page N13 of the Boston Globe on 12/8/2002. (c) Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. | |
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