Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

All secretaries of state, sooner or later, are interviewed by Charlie Rose. Only Henry Kissinger appeared on Rose’s show nearly forty times, to say nothing of his cameos in the soap opera Dynasty 6and The Colbert Report . All secretaries of state are caricatured in the newspapers. Only Kissinger became an animated cartoon character in three television series (in Freakazoid, 7 The Simpsons, 8and Family Guy ). 9

Yet as Kissinger was all too well aware even in 1972, this kind of celebrity can easily flip into notoriety. “The consequences of what I do, I mean the public’s judgment[s],” he assured Oriana Fallaci, “have never bothered me.

I don’t ask for popularity, I’m not looking for popularity. On the contrary, if you really want to know, I care nothing about popularity. I’m not at all afraid of losing my public; I can allow myself to say what I think…. If I were to let myself be disturbed by the reactions of the public, if I were to act solely on the basis of a calculated technique, I would accomplish nothing…. I don’t say that all this has to go on forever. In fact, it may evaporate as quickly as it came. 10

He was right.

Fame is double-edged; to be famous is also to be mocked. In 1971 Woody Allen parodied Kissinger in a half-hour “mockumentary” made for PBS and entitled Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story . Hurriedly written and filmed after Allen had finished “ Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * * But Were Afraid to Ask, ” the film was due to air in February 1972 but was almost certainly pulled for political reasons. 11(PBS claimed it could not show the film in an election year without giving other candidates equal coverage, but the reality was that the government-funded broadcaster could not persuade Allen to drop his sharpest digs at, among others, Pat Nixon and feared arousing the ire of the White House.) 12Typical of the film is the scene in which Wallinger — played by Allen — is heard on the phone demanding “an injunction against the Times . It’s a New York, Jewish, Communist, left-wing newspaper, and that’s just the sports section.” In another scene, Wallinger is asked to comment on President Nixon’s (authentic) statement that “we shall end the war [in Vietnam] and win the peace.” “What Mr. Nixon means,” Allen mumbles, “is that, uh, it’s important to win the war and also win the peace; or, at the very least, lose the war and lose the peace; or, uh, win at least part of the peace, or win two peaces, perhaps, or lose a few peaces but win a piece of the war. The other alternative would be to win a piece of the war, or lose a piece of Mr. Nixon.”

INTERVIEWER: There’s a lot of talk around Washington that you have an extremely active social life.

WALLINGER: Well that’s greatly exaggerated I think, I… I… like attractive women, I like sex, but, um, but it must be American sex. I don’t like un-American sex.

INTERVIEWER: Well how would you distinguish American sex?

WALLINGER: If you’re ashamed of it, it’s American sex. You know, uh, that’s important, if you feel guilt… and shame, otherwise I think sex without guilt is bad because it almost becomes pleasurable. 13

Responding to the objection by the PBS top brass that the film was in bad taste, Allen quipped, “It’s hard to say anything about that administration that wouldn’t be in bad taste.” 14

Wisecracks about the Nixon administration were standard fare for Manhattan comedians long before the president’s downfall. For Kissinger, being second only to Nixon in the government meant being second only to him as a target — in every available medium. The satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer’s ditties are now mostly forgotten, but the same cannot be said for his remark that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” 15Earlier, the French singer-songwriter Henri Salvador had composed the irritatingly catchy “Kissinger, Le Duc Tho” to mock the lack of progress in the negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam. The cartoonist David Levine produced perhaps the most savage of all pictorial attacks on Kissinger — more than a dozen in all, including two that even the left-liberal New York Review of Books found too egregious to publish: one of a naked Kissinger, his back covered in macabre tattoos, the other of Kissinger under a stars-and-stripes bedcover, gleefully ravishing a naked female whose head is the globe. (Despite protests from his staff, Victor Navasky published the latter caricature in The Nation .) 16

It is as if Henry Kissinger’s personality — his very name — hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation. In Joseph Heller’s 1979 novel Good as Gold, the protagonist, a middle-aged professor of English literature named Bruce Gold, is working on a book about none other than:

Kissinger.

How he loved and hated that hissing name.

Even apart from his jealousy, which was formidable, Gold had hated Henry Kissinger from the moment of his emergence as a public figure and hated him still. 17

Inane though it is, Eric Idle’s song for Monty Python shows that the neuralgia was transatlantic:

Henry Kissinger,

How I’m missing yer,

You’re the Doctor of my dreams.

With your crinkly hair,

And your glassy stare,

And your Machiavellian schemes. 18

An entire era is distilled in the moment at Madison Square Garden when Idle and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones made “silly faces” behind Kissinger’s back after they had all seen Muhammad Ali fight. As soon as Kissinger had gone, the two English entertainers “collapsed howling in a heap on the floor.” 19

II

Some laughed at Kissinger. Others froze. “An eel icier than ice” was how Fallaci put it. “God, what an icy man!”

During the whole interview he never changed that expressionless countenance, that hard or ironic look, and never altered the tone of that sad, monotonous, unchanging voice. The needle on the tape recorder shifts when a word is pronounced in a higher or lower key. With him it remained still, and more than once I had to check to make sure that the machine was working. Do you know that obsessive, hammering sound of rain falling on a roof? His voice is like that. And basically his thoughts as well.

To enter the realm of journalism about Henry Kissinger is to encounter much in this hysterical vein. He was, Fallaci went on, “the most guilty representative of the kind of power of which Bertrand Russell speaks: If they say ‘Die,’ we shall die. If they say ‘live,’ we shall live.” He based “his actions on secrecy, absolutism, and the ignorance of people not yet awakened to the discovery of their rights.” 20

Sometimes the hysteria tips over into outright lunacy. Wild allegations against Kissinger can be found on a host of websites purporting to expose the nefarious activities of the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, organizations allegedly established by the “Illuminati” to realize their evil scheme for “world government.” 21Such claims come in at least four flavors: Anglophobe, paranoid anti-Communist, deranged-fantasist, and leftist-populist.

The Anglophobe version derives from the work of the Georgetown University historian Carroll Quigley, who traced a British plot against America back to Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner and identified J. P. Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations, and The New Republic magazine as key conspirators. 22According to the former Trotskyite Lyndon LaRouche, “Sir” Henry Kissinger was all along a “British Agent of Influence” (the evidence: his honorary knighthood and a 1982 Chatham House speech). 23LaRouche’s associates have also alleged that William Yandell Elliott, Kissinger’s Harvard mentor, belonged to “a network of unreconstructed Confederates who continued Britain’s Civil War against the United States through cultural and other means.” Their aim was “to establish… a new ‘dark age’ of globally extended medieval feudalism, built on the ruined remains of the United States and any nation which strove to establish itself on any approximation of American principles.” This network bound together the Ku Klux Klan, the Tennessee Templars, the Round Table, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and the Harvard International Seminar run by Kissinger. 24