Luncheons With Henry

However, I attended a number of private luncheons thrown for Kissinger by two successive editors-in-chief of the Washington Times whom I served under, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Wesley Pruden over a 13-year period and in later years I was often a guest at Council on World Affairs luncheons and dinners where the great man spoke, circulated and chatted with ordinary mortals. 

This occurred over a long 35-year period and during it I was able to make a number of first-hand observations that have been notably missing in the predictable waves of demonization and sneering now that he is safely (?) dead.

First, Kissinger never went senile. And this should be amazing.

Several times when he spoke at length, with wit, brilliance and wisdom at large dinners of hundreds of people, the Great and the Good around me would sneeringly murmur that he must be reading mindlessly from a teleprompter. 

But Henry was not Joe Biden or George W. Bush. Even in his late 90s, he always fielded questions, including hostile ones from his audience – something Bush Junior always had a mortal terror of ever doing. And his answers were always off-the-cuff, accurate, intelligent and usually very funny. Unlike Biden in his glory, Kissinger even coming up to age 100 never talked or dwelled in La La Land, he always recognized the messy and usually lethal nature of the world as it really was.

Second, Kissinger really was profound and funny. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever bothered to actually watch him in action or to read any of his stylish, beautifully written and academically masterful major books.

Again, this is unusual among major figures. It has been openly known for at least 60 years that “The Second World War,” Winston Churchill’s colossal, ponderous and usually unreadable history of World War II and self-serving memoir was largely compiled and its witless, joyless, unending dead text ground out by an army of academic researchers all of whom have acknowledged it. This did not stop Churchill, of course, from accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature anyway.

Third, Kissinger was not some uniquely evil, cynical, Machiavellian figure in refusing to come clean about everything he did, ordered and approved during his years of power. 

On the contrary, in the realpolitik European tradition of Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck whom he so greatly admired, Kissinger took it for granted and openly acknowledged that much of what statesmen and national leaders did – and had to do – to protect their nations and peoples and avoid, where possible major wars had to involve public lies, deception, conspiracy, intrigue and often ruthless violence.

Benjamin Franklin, a decades-long member of England’s notorious Hellfire Club and the diplomatic genius who brought France into the war to win American independence would surely have agreed with all that.

Following Kissinger’s death, a respected friend back in Ireland wrote me wistfully that it was a pity that when in power, he never practiced the high moral standards he had espoused – or, more accurately, pretended to espouse – in his early classic work on post-Napoleonic European diplomacy, “A World Restored.”

Was Kissinger therefore a hypocrite and guilty of double standards? Arguably of course yes. But the clear, obvious reality was that he never took those standards seriously in the first place. As a rising professor in liberal, high-minded Harvard among all those naive Americans, he knew he still had to be on his best behavior.

For, Kissinger grew up in the Europe of the 1920s and 30s in the awful catastrophic wreckage of Woodrow Wilson’s unbelievable high minded bungling at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference after World War I.

Open covenants openly negotiated as Wilson was determined to achieve at Versailles, proved to be a Rube Goldberg absurdity, birthing instead a frightful world of unleashed hatreds, uncontrollable vicious passions and previously unimaginable genocides, massacres, ethnic cleansings, and totalitarian dictatorships that ravaged all of Europe and Asia uncontrollably for generations. The cautious cynical aristocrats who wheeled and dealed at the Congress of Vienna, and largely in secret, Kissinger claimed, did a far better job,

In my own career I covered and travelled with many secretaries of state from the masterful and extremely responsible and able, like George Schultz, James A. Baker and General Colin Powell to the most awful clowns and bumblers.

One of the very worst was also personally a kind, honest, sensitive, genuinely well-meaning and high-minded gentleman – President Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state Warren Christopher. 

Already aged 67 when he took office and supposedly immensely experienced – he had served also four years as deputy secretary of state – Christopher travelled widely and energetically but paced himself carefully. 

I especially loved travelling with him for that reason. Every transpacific trip always involved leisurely stopovers in both directions in Hawaii that my newspaper had to pay to have me share in. And personally, Christopher was gracious, patient, thoughtful and kind. A delightful human being.

But in running the affairs of the world for the United States Government, Christopher was a nightmare. He followed the catastrophic recommendations of United Nations diplomat Kofi Annan and his own assistant secretary of state for African affairs Susan Rice in deciding the United States and its allies did not need to intervene or support a far stronger international military presence in Rwanda to prevent the outbreak of civil strife there. As a result, up to a million people died in one of the most awful, bestial primitive genocides even of our own blood-stained times.

Nor did Christopher have a clue how to end the multiple outbreaks of hatred, massacres and ethnic cleansing that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s either. 

It took a man he distrusted and despised, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, using classic Kissinger tactics of lies, bullying, bluff and apparently reckless threats of force to eventually end what was until Ukraine, Europe’s worst violence and suffering since World War II.

Christopher never forgave Holbrooke for that achievement and forced him out of office. Holbrooke who could be a pompous and overbearing and ridiculous man but was also surprisingly vulnerable and lovable never truly recovered.

Indeed, the most telling criticism universally whispered about Holbrooke behind his back was, “Richard wants to be the Second Kissinger. But too many people still remember the first one.” Henry would have laughed grimly at that.

For, it was his very ruthlessness as well as his public hypocrisy and effortless ability to flatter, deceive and lie that enabled Kissinger to defend and advance the national interests of the United States so well.

Henry Kissinger knew he lived in a Fallen World.

He did not share the nearly universal American delusion on both conservative right and liberal left that this world was perfectible and that it could and should, therefore, be perfected – In Our Time! Instantly! Now! 

“Americans all think like engineers,” Henry loved to say. “They think every issue is a problem that can and should be solved immediately once sufficient thought and resources are brought to bear on it.”

“But in human affairs,” Henry always continued, “many problems are the result of ongoing conflicts and irreconcilable claims. Such conflicts cannot be ‘solved.’ They must therefore be contained and managed, until eventually they become irrelevant and fade away.”

The myriad hatreds and feuds of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was one such issue which had always to be closely monitored and endlessly ameliorated but would never, in the foreseeable future, be ‘solved,’ Kissinger therefore maintained.

If there was a Messiah coming – Christian, Muslim or Jewish – to set everything straight. He – or she – would come in their own time. But statesmen – and women – had a moral obligation to do the best they could to protect and safeguard the world – Now.

Inflicting moralistic, holier than thou chaos would always only make matters worse. The man who had been persecuted as a young Jew in Hitler’s Germany, fought Nazi tyranny as a combat soldier in World War II and then fought the Cold War with ruthless single mindedness to prevent global communist conquest in the following decades believed that to the marrow of his bones.

No global thermonuclear war broke out on Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s watch. None ever came or threatened with imminence during the many decades Kissinger endlessly traveled to Moscow and Beijing to be received and respected with seriousness and honor – almost to the day he died.

How long shall we survive without him?