Dowd on Kissinger

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Dec 1 19:45:07 PST 2002


New York Times December 1, 2002

He's Ba-a-ack!

By MAUREEN DOWD

W ASHINGTON It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy,

outside the box.

Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the

man who used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?

Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than

the man who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps

and secret coups, and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment

and Nobel Peace Prize winner?

It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as

pathologically opaque as the vice president could appreciate the

sublime translucency of Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on

recreating the glory days of the Ford and Nixon White Houses could

have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange I mean, Dr. Kissinger

to the Bush team.

There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to

lead the 9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist,

not so much Metternich as Machiavelli.

They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's résumé: keeping the Vietnam

War going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable;

encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous

Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be

"a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the Pentagon

Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track down

leaks on the Cambodia bombing.

If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same

sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many

results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and

preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called himself

"a secret swinger."

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade:

"deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum,"

"flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The über-diplomat has even

been criticized for dissembling in his own memoirs. But secretiveness

is not a disqualification for jobs in this White House. Quite the

contrary: only the clandestine and the conspiratorial need apply.

Mr. Bush, after all, worked very hard to suppress any investigation of

9/11. He had to cave to the victims' families, who were hellbent to

hear what the president learned in his August 2001 briefing about Al

Qaeda plans, and what wires were crossed at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and

I.N.S.

Now Mr. Bush can let the commission proceed, secure in the knowledge

that Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on a single dark corner, or

failed to flatter a boss, in his entire celebrated career. (He was one

of Mr. Bush's patient tutors in foreign policy during the campaign.)

If you want to get to the bottom of something, you don't appoint Henry

Kissinger. If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of

something, you appoint Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Bush learned about the diplomat's black belt in the black arts

long ago, when he made a patsy of Bush père. As the ambassador to the

U.N. in 1971, Bush 41 was accused of aggressively making the case for

Taiwan and against Beijing, even as Mr. Kissinger, the national

security adviser, was secretly traveling to Beijing and undercutting

Taiwan.

Afterward, Mr. Kissinger told George H. W. Bush he was "disappointed"

that Beijing had gotten Taiwan's seat in the U.N. "Given the fact that

we were saying one thing in New York and doing another in Washington,"

Mr. Bush drily observed, "that outcome was inevitable."

Fortunately, Bush Jr. was not held back by the revulsion that many in

his generation have for Mr. Kissinger's power-drunk promotion of

bloody American adventures abroad. As the former fraternity president

told GQ magazine, he stayed a retro 50's guy through the roiling 60's:

"I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale."

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's principles:

that the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S. media, that

American diplomacy may be happily indifferent to American public

opinion, that the great unwashed masses of our democracy are just a

big old drag on the elites who know what's best, and that corporate

pals are a help, not a hindrance, in government work.

For this administration, outside the box is inside the box.

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