Pushovers of the press

The media elite are reviewing Henry Kissinger's latest tome with their usual fawning gullibility. Best not to mention those bony hands reaching out from the grave.

By Todd Gitlin

Jul 3, 2001 | If you're a college professor who tells students that you saw combat in Vietnam when you were actually teaching history at West Point, your lie will land on the front page of the New York Times and provide debate fodder in the letters columns, on National Public Radio and wherever else serious people reason together. On the other hand, if you're a serial liar who claims to have brought peace to Vietnam while presiding over pointless deaths in the hundreds of thousands (more than 22,000 Americans, the rest Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians), you'll never dine alone or lack for honors; you'll be lionized by Ted Koppel and your book of International Studies 101 pieties will be treated as "an intellectual event ... that is also a tour de force" (Walter Russell Mead in the Washington Post).

But then, Henry Kissinger has more lives than any Laotian peasant or Chilean socialist who happened to stand in the way of his designs during the years when he administered American foreign policy with B-52s and coup plans. Having sequestered his official papers at the Library of Congress for 50 -- that's 50 -- years and published well-received memoirs that cannot easily be corrected precisely because that valuable evidence is locked away in a vault, he now steps forward with an unsurprisingly self-serving book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" -- one with the obviously intended answer: yes, and guess whose? Having supervised an apparently badly needed foreign policy for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger now capitalizes on his self-perpetuating repute to duck any question that might cast doubt upon the worthiness of the tough-guy realism he not only fancies but personifies.

Mainly he gets away with it. He got away with it in 1971 when refusing to say whether the Nixon administration had made any estimates of Indochinese casualties (an episode related in Tom Wells' new biography of Daniel Ellsberg, "Wild Man"), and he still gets away with it. For more than 30 years now, when the American press comes around Henry Kissinger -- that's Dr. Kissinger to you -- a giant sucking sound can be heard. While Robert S. McNamara was mauled (by this writer, among others) for his disingenuous and insufficient Vietnam apology, Kissinger is steadfastly unrepentant -- he sneers at apologies, in fact -- and weaves his way from talk show to talk show unscathed. He scorns Clinton for making post-Cold War apologies and congratulates Nixon for "negotiated extrication from Vietnam" while preserving a reputation for straightforward talk. He chides our Vietnam-era NATO allies for holding themselves "aloof" from America's war, and no one ever tells him that this is hardly the right word for the strong opposition that came forth from, among others, Charles de Gaulle (the subject of some of McNamara's most interesting pages).

From Kissinger, gravitas and a gravely voice are mistaken for wisdom. His clichis, when issued in suitably ex cathedra tones, strike journalists as profundities. The ostensible literary critic Norman Podhoretz once raved about Kissinger's prose style, and now even the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, calls him a good writer. But in the current book, barely a page passes without some inept, ungrammatical or fatuous formulation -- a subliterary phenomenon unremarked upon by any reviewer I've read. I open four of Kissinger's pages at random and find these contortions, confusions and clichis:

The Cold War strategies sought to manage the conflict of the nuclear superpowers by the policy of containment of the Soviet Union.

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Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster
352 pages

In fact, India's conduct during the Cold War was not so different from that of the United States in its formative decades.

Or is the rush to Tehran an obstacle to a rapprochement which is in itself not in dispute?

The West's relations with Russia have always been laced with ambivalence.

If Kissinger passes over a subject, most of his reviewers have no objection. About Angola, Kissinger's single reference is as follows: "The civil war in Angola has lasted for thirty-eight years." As if eight of those years were not on his watch, when the U.S. backed the anti-Russian side (which is still at war) strictly because it was anti-Russian. By contrast, Warren Cohen of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, distinguishes himself from other reviewers by noting that Kissinger's tendentious account of Chile in the years between 1970 and 1973 omits mention of the kidnap and murder of Chilean chief of staff Rene Schneider in 1970, a move that opened the way for Pinochet's coup against Allende.

Next Page: Kissinger's self-serving critique of war crimes tribunals

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