48 years of Covering Kissinger

I was incredibly young then. I was still a junior academic. I was just testing the waters as a freelancer. I was bumming around the Middle East. It was still remarkably easy and safe to do so then. 

The whole region was in a state of bewilderment. No one thought Kissinger’s solutions could possibly last. Half a century later they still do.

Neither the Israelis, nor the Syrians nor the Egyptians knew what had hit them. They didn’t like Henry and they didn’t trust him. His proposals, his solutions were endlessly complicated. They flew in the face of plain common sense. As my friend Yaakov Kirschen, the legendary Jerusalem Post political cartoonist Dry Bones wrote: “And so the great peacemaker brought peace to the warring desert tribes.”

“And how did he do that?”

“He sold weapons to both sides.”

Kissinger had employed the same breathtakingly cynical, outrageous methods he had used to save Western civilization from collapse and conquest. He had divided the Soviet Union and China and made their own prosperity and long-term prospects dependent on trade and aid with the United States.

He was of course reviled from East and West alike: Israelis hated and feared him as a self-hating Jew. President Richard Nixon boasted of him sneeringly as “My Jew Boy.”

But Kissinger had the last laugh. When Nixon was hounded out of office in shame, Kissinger continued to thrive and prosper under his successor Gerald Ford, a man he admired and appreciated for the rest of their amazingly long lives.

It was a dangerous – and often fatal – mistake to defy him or underestimate him.

King Feisal of Saudi Arabia quadrupled global oil prices and was an open radical Islamist who regarded all Jews as children of the devil and told Kissinger so, knowing Kissinger was of Jewish background.

“Well, Henry said diplomatically. “There are Jews and Jews.”

Only a few months later Feisal was dead.  Killed by a nephew who had done drugs and sex in California and who showed remarkable indications of brainwashing and mind-control. For the next more than 45 years, no Saudi leader ever dared to defy the wishes of the United States government again. Oil prices first stabilized and then in the 1980s fell dramatically, The Saudis invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States. America prospered again.

A decade later I came to Washington covering foreign policy and national security for The Washington Times. Kissinger was supposedly a has-been by then. He was making his own hundreds of millions – at least – with his consulting firm Kissinger Associates.  He was and remained till both their deaths at ages over 100 the closest friend and adviser to banker David Rockefeller, still the welder of limitless influence and power.

Henry always generated hatred and hysteria to a degree not seen in US history since the great Franklin Roosevelt himself, though President Donald Trump seems to have effortlessly outdistanced him in that regard.

On the left, radicals and liberals foamed at the mouth at Kissinger. they hated him far more than they had ever hated Hitler or Stalin. 

Kissinger directly exposed their pretensions. He professed to sneer at their bleeding-heart concern for human rights. But he always proclaimed that lecturing non-democratic governments publicly and endlessly on human rights only guaranteed they would crack down and crush descent ever harder. Real human beings suffered and died. All the Jimmy Carter’s, Barack Obama’s, Joe Biden’s and Anthony Blinkens of the world felt moral and righteous and so superior to Kissinger. It did not matter to them that real human beings suffered for their empty posturing.

And it was Kissinger, not the liberals or the neocons who negotiated the apparently-innocent but historic 1975 Helsinki Accords for President Ford. They bound the Soviet Union and its Central European satellites into structures of public negotiation to uphold human rights. 

The Accords gave hope to hundreds of millions of people. They undermined the decaying Soviet communist system. Within a decade, the Soviets had been forced to attempt internal moderate reform, the glasnost or openness and perestroika or restructuring policies. They led to the total collapse of the communist system. The neocons claimed all the credit, of course, but it was Henry’s not theirs.

But Kissinger was no liberal, no softie: He was merciless in supporting the most corrupt and ruthless regimes from Zaire and The Philippines to Chile and Pakistan. He maintained the alternatives were far worse.

Kissinger was accused of not remembering his experiences as a teenage Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. In fact he remembered them only too well. Modern Germans revered Kissinger. But he despised them. When even the decent Social Democratic government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt offered to reunite him with surviving relatives in modern Germany, Henry demurred. “My relatives are soap,” he replied.

Now Kissinger is being accused of creating the neocons who have controlled US foreign policy with catastrophic results for nearly the past quarter century. It is an absurd and hysterical lie. The neocons always hated Kissinger. First they were jealous of him. Then they falsely accused him of betraying America, being a defeatist and losing the Cold War when in fact he won it.

The truth was that the neocons hated him for achieving what they never could. Hated his brilliance, his extraordinary mastery of diplomacy, strategy and hundreds of years of world history when none of them ever had a clue.

Through it all he set up a system that kept the overall peace of the world for generations. Japan rose and fell, China rose. The US industrial base collapsed under the impact of free trade. Kissinger of course was blamed for that too. But it was the doing of the endless succession of economically illiterate presidents from Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama  who proudly took credit for the catastrophe. And they deserved it.

By the time he was 23, Henry Kissinger had experienced what it was to be a persecuted Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, surviving the Great Depression in New York City and serving as a brave and decorated American soldier against the Nazis in the European Theater of Operations. It was an education more lasting and profound than anything he ever acquired at Harvard, where he quickly rose to the top.

At heart, Kissinger was no liberal, no neocon, no Jew and not even a banker either. He was an American imperialist and proud of it to the day he died.

But he was also something more. He was an open admirer of Machiavelli – of course. But he should also provoke memories of Benvenuto Cellini – a Renaissance Man: Outstanding at so many things. And proud of all of them.

His ego was no small thing either. Nor should it have been. Henry Kissinger always had the last word. And the last laugh.