Greetings and Happy Human Rights Day!

Henry Kissinger served on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the early years of the Endowment during the second Reagan Administration, from 1985 to 1989. Thus during the wind down and end of the Cold War.

For a good scene setter noting Kissinger’s role, see “Missionaries for Democracy: US Aid for Global Pluralism”, in the June 1, 1986 New York Times.

This position for Kissinger had escaped my attention until with the news of his death I looked back at the early 2009 press release from the International Republican Institute (IRI) announcing that Kissinger would receive that year’s IRI “Freedom Award”. (Given that IRI was promoting democracy in Cambodia, Bangladesh and East Timor among other places where Kissinger’s government service record in relation to democracy issues was well known by then to have been, shall we say politely “controversial”, I was a bit taken aback. Obviously Kissinger was a primo draw for a D.C. foreign policy establishment fundraising dinner but I was still surprised at the specific symbolism for IRI.)

I first visited NED in June 2007 as the new IRI Resident Director for East Africa on my way out to Nairobi. I met with Bronwyn Bruton, longtime DC Africa hand, who was managing the East Africa grant portfolio at NED which would fund much of our IRI work in Kenya (assuming approval at a meeting of the NED board which I also attended) along with her boss Dave Peterson who has been NED’s Africa Director dating back to Kissinger’s time on the board in 1988.

It was only in the summer of 2009, after I was back at Northrop Grumman in Mississippi and my dustup with Ambassador Ranneberger over the Kenya IRI/USAID exit poll and election observation had been on the front page of the New York Times that I attended a public Kenya program at NED and got to meet longtime President Carl Gershman and other executives. (I have written about that event previously in regards to Kenya.)

With Kissinger’s death the copyright on material he produced in his NED papers at Yale has passed from Dr. Kissinger to the University. I have spent time this weekend looking at what the Yale Library has digitized on-line of the six boxes. I have reached out to a couple of friends in the academic world who work with the study of democracy assistance to see if they are interested in collaborating with a layman/practitioner to study this.

Some interesting things I have learned so far: Kissinger was not on the initial board of directors when NED was established in 1984 following passage of the enabling legislation in December 1983, but was sent an invitation by Mr. Gershman in December 1984 following discussions that fall. Kissinger accepted in late January explaining that his response had been delayed by his travel schedule.

Most of the material is just copies of NED board correspondence, but there are slips and notes indicating his many scheduling conflicts between Kissinger & Associates business, corporate boards and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

By late 1988 Kissinger had received a letter from NED’s outside general counsel noting that his three straight absences from board meetings would necessitate his removal by policy, but that there would an opportunity at the next meeting to present “extenuating circumstances” to excuse the attendance issue. After some confusion on whether he had automatically been removed, Kissinger submitted his letter of resignation because of his other time commitments in January 1989.

One is left with the impression that Kissinger might have been something of a foreign affairs celebrity/senior statesman board member who did not heavily engage with NED governance.

Perhaps ironically as to Kissinger, the big feather in NED’s cap in late 1988 was deploying a special Congressional appropriation along with other funds to support in Chile the “no (to General Pinochet)” campaign in the plebiscite that Pinochet had called on continued military rule.

NED funded usual Chilean civil society type programs as well as the funding to NDI for the campaign which among other things paid for three American political consultants, including Glen Cowan of Francis, McGinnis & Rees, who pioneered the NDI-funded PVT through the opposition parties and through the local “Committee for Free Elections”. NDI, according to their quotes in clips circulated by Mr. Gershman to his board, added private funding to the US Government funding provided through NED.

It might be that as a private citizen and businessman by 1988 Dr. Kissinger was no longer intensely interested in Chile or General Pinochet; perhaps he sort of informally recused himself from the NED board in the context of Reagan’s second term pivot reflected in Mr. Gershman’s description (“the basic concept was to promote a peaceful and stable democratic transition”). Maybe he now supported democracy in Chile affirmatively to the point he did not feel it necessary to show up? Without being able to ask him, maybe we can learn more going forward.

[This Chile work was the origin of the NDI-funded PVT programs that I have written about in Kenya’s 2013 and subsequent elections, as well as in the most recent elections in Malawi and DRC. There are some big differences between the late Cold War NED NDI Chile work in 1988 and the application of the tool by USAID in conjunction with their other democracy programing in 21st Century Africa.

Glenn Cowan joined Eric Bjornlund from NDI in forming Democracy International (DI) in 2003 and published an extensive Vote Count Verification User’s Guide for USAID following a wide consultation among implementors in 2010. They gave me a valued copy several years ago. I will hope to write more about this after catching up with old friends at DI and elsewhere.]

For more from NDI, see the 40th Anniversary retrospective at “NDI: BOLSTERING GENUINE ELECTIONS TO SECURE DEMOCRACY – THROUGH CITIZEN AND INTERNATIONAL ELECTION OBSERVATION”.

UPDATE: Continued research shows that Kissinger attended no more than one NED Board meeting after the spring of 1987, but executed a consent on June 28, 1988 approving the NED grants supported by those members who attended the June 5, 1987 meeting, including 6 grants to NDI, among them “Chile: Promoting Free and Fair Elections -$110,172”.