“Mister Kissinger, he dead.” (with apologies to Joseph Conrad)
As a little boy from Maine, the prospect of spending Thanksgiving with the mythical Henry Kissinger was exciting beyond words – my mother took me down to Coffins in Rockland and bought me a grey, corduroy, three-piece suit. For the meal, my grandfather ordered a suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. When the honored guest arrived in the narrow corridor, the already elder statesman hunched over to pat me on the head. I don’t think I washed my hair for a week or two afterwards, but, in those days, that was actually pretty normal for me.
Of course, not everyone looked at Dr. K with the same reverence. My brush with greatness occurred years before journalist Christopher Hitchens sought to have Kissinger tried on war crimes – was it for Vietnam or Chile or someplace else? It’s probable the heavily accented German-American even chuckled when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick quipped that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was “a letter to Santa Claus.”
Kissinger’s assertion that “power is the greatest aphrodisiac” probably did more than any other piece of sage wisdom to screw up my early dating life. The young don’t always pick their heroes wisely.
What was it about Kissinger that so captured some of our imaginations? His Jewish family emigrated from Nazi Germany to the U.S. in 1938, so his having been spared the inferno of the Holocaust might have had something to do with his aura.
As an interpreter and intelligence officer in Europe in the 1940s (young Heinz, now Henry, joined the Army five years after reaching our shores), he stood face-to-face with evil. Yet it was his pragmatism and ability to strip foreign policy and national security of nettlesome emotion that made him iconic.
Bombing the Vietnamese all the way to the negotiating table in Paris, opening relations with China – to whom we now kowtow, propping up military strongmen in Latin America or cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin (for whom he never registered as a foreign agent, cluck-cluck) are all policies that make the standard graduate student of international relations today simultaneously gape with horror while also acquiescently nodding that ‘it is what it is.’
Today, Americans seem to accept – to the extent we think about foreign policy at all – that the world is filled with rotten choices, much like our own political establishment. In it, we are compelled to make choices that strengthen our future options, never mind the ephemeral comfort of virtue-signaling. That, perhaps, is Kissinger’s legacy.
But there was something else about him that transcended the way we think about greatness. That, I would argue, is the agency of the individual.
Washington is a derivative town. In the swamp, everyone is derivative of someone else – the senator who brought them up, the secretary under whom they mentored, the columnist for whom they ghosted. Oh, you’re a Klobuchar guy, or a Clinton gal (or in current national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s case, both), that’s how swamp creatures recognize one another. Even though Nixon reportedly referred to Kissinger as “my Jew,” the gravelly voiced academic was bigger in some respects than his one-time boss.
And, shockingly, he was a lothario. For those of us who missed out on the glory of the football field, that was something. A brainy guy could also be appealing to chicks, the same way Arthur Miller once was to Marilyn Monroe. He gave us hope that it wasn’t only Joe DeMaggio who got the game.
Still, we must judge the man – to the extent any of us are qualified to judge anything at all – not on the basis of style, but rather result. That is where the hagiography ends, with LeBron James reminding us we all need “to be educated” on how helpful and essential Beijing is to our daily existence. If our guiding credo in world politics is indeed that the ends justify the means, Kissinger’s result was to legitimize that thinking as the smart alternative to airy idealism.
The cartoon that informed me this morning that the old man finally passed depicts the grim reaper picking the recently deceased statesman out of a needle in a haystack carnival game as he exclaims with glee: “I finally got Kissinger!”
After all, the house always wins.
