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.
