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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