On the menu today: Last night, we received simultaneously unsurprising yet somehow shocking news, marking the end of an era. Former secretary of state and national-security adviser Henry Kissinger passed away. Also, a reminder about the often-sad stories of political child stars.
Remembering Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, who died at age 100 yesterday, lived so long that one of the people who contributed to his obituary in the New York Times, Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor, died 13 years ago.
Newspapers write obituaries for famous people well ahead of time, so that when the famous person passes, most of the work is complete and the only thing that needs to be added is the details of the person’s death. The draft of the obituary is written, edited, approved, and filed away until the day it’s needed . . . in some cases, decades later. A few weeks ago, discussing President Biden’s 81st birthday, I wrote, “You have to live as long as Henry Kissinger to think of your eighties as ‘the good old days.’” Dan McLaughlin reminded us that Joe Biden voted to confirm Kissinger as secretary of state.
You’ll see some intense debates about Kissinger in the coming days; The Huffington Post headline is “Henry Kissinger, America’s Most Notorious War Criminal, Dies At 100.”
But the arguments about Kissinger in 2023 will be less heated and impassioned than they would have been in 2013, or 2003, or 1993. This is because a significant portion of the people who cared the most about the Vietnam War, or the bombing of Cambodia, or détente, or the Nixon presidency at the time are no longer with us. Kissinger outlived many of his critics, which is one way to have the last laugh.
There are lots of disadvantages to getting old, but one of the advantages is that you outlast some of the things that annoy you. Think about it: We’re heading toward a presidential election in which we’re not going to hear any Baby Boomers arguing about who did what during the Vietnam War. Our most likely options are the Democrat who was exempted from the draft because of asthma as a teenager and student deferments and the Republican who received four student deferments and one deferment for bone spurs in his feet. Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, and George Bush must wonder if they would have avoided a lot of grief if they had run on a national ticket later in life. The military draft ended and the last U.S. soldier left Vietnam in 1973; an American who was 18 that year, and feared getting drafted, is 68 today.
While Kissinger has been an informal adviser to every president since Kennedy, he departed his last official government position, national-security adviser, in 1975. (Unless you want to count Kissinger’s one-month stint as the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission.) I suspect that a lot of young progressive activists don’t know much about Kissinger, other than the fact that they’re supposed to hate him.
Our founder, William F. Buckley, had both great admiration for Kissinger and intense disagreements. If you ever get a chance to read Execution Eve And Other Contemporary Ballads, the collection of Buckley’s work from the mid 1970s, do so. Buckley joined Nixon on his famous trip to China — as the Nixon Foundation put it in 2008, “At the time, Mr. Buckley was the virtual sole equivalent of today’s vast network of talk-radio hosts, conservative columnists, and right leaning pundits. He was THE voice of a movement. And, though he was surely glad to be on board the plane — he was far from on board with the politics of it all.”
And in those columns, you get a sense of how strongly Buckley felt Kissinger, President Nixon, and his team were giving away the store:
Here is what the Chinese gave up: 1) They consented to traffic with representatives of the government of the United States even though the United States still recognizes the government of Taiwan. 2) They performed routine rhetorical exercises on the themes of world peace and national sovereignty, thereby disappointing a few Berkeley sophomores and African fundamentalists who believed that Maoism would never equivocate on the primacy of its international revolutionary mission. When the New York Times’ reporter asked Kissinger: What has the United States accomplished that wasn’t already accomplished by Ping-Pong? Mr. Kissinger, nettled, recited Chinese obeisances to the good international life. He might as well have cited the Soviet Union’s guarantee of civil liberties as listed in its constitution.
This morning, the editors of NR bid farewell to Kissinger, attempting to sum up his far-reaching legacy in just a few paragraphs:
His record as Nixon’s national-security adviser, then secretary of state, is the foreign-policy record of the Nixon administration. Nixon, intelligent and experienced, set his own course. But Kissinger approved, implemented, and, in professorial media turns, publicized it. The tilt to Pakistan, the opening to China, the Yom Kippur War and shuttle diplomacy, toppling Allende, Vietnam peace talks — all bore Kissinger’s fingerprints. Kissinger’s reading of the Cold War’s power balance and of America’s capabilities was meliorist, and struck conservatives as defeatist. (WFB’s NR columns on Nixon’s trip to China were savage.) Kissinger thought he was doing the best in a bad world.
Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in the GOP changed the party’s, and the country’s, attitude. Reagan’s view of the Cold War, as he told an associate early on, was, “We win and they lose.” But Kissinger kept his hand in, as an adviser and commentator — in Washington lingo, a wise man. One of his latest pieces of advice was among his least wise: He was a lifelong advocate for engagement with Communist China. He profited as a consultant, but the more important motive was pride: He could not bear to see his historic opening becoming a dead end. That was a tragedy he could not face.
This morning, you can find tributes to Kissinger from both the foreign minister of Ukraine and . . . Vladmir Putin:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday expressed his condolences over the death of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, saying in a telegram to Kissinger’s widow Nancy that he was a “wise and farsighted statesman”.
“The name of Henry Kissinger is inextricably linked with a pragmatic foreign policy line, which at one time made it possible to achieve detente in international tensions and reach the most important Soviet-American agreements that contributed to the strengthening of global security,” Putin said.
“I had the opportunity to personally communicate with this deep, extraordinary man many times, and I will undoubtedly retain the fondest memory of him.”
First . . . the Russian government still sends telegrams, huh?
Second, in his final years, Kissinger still stirred the pot with comments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In May 2022, Kissinger called for negotiations:
Ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante. I believe pursuing the war beyond that point could turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine, which has been undertaken with great cohesion by NATO, but into a war against Russia itself. The status quo ante . . . the borders existing where the war started on 24 February. Russia would disgorge its conquests thence, but not the territory it occupied nearly a decade ago, including Crimea. That territory could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.
Unsurprisingly, the Ukrainians were livid at the suggestion that Russia should be allowed to keep any Ukrainian territory it had illegally annexed and occupied.
But by May 2023, Kissinger had rethought his stance and concluded that the safest path ahead included having Ukraine as a member of NATO. “The outcome should be one in which Ukraine remains protected by Europe and doesn’t become a solitary state just looking out for itself.”
Kissinger is no longer with us, but you will probably see his quotes in columns for the rest of your days. It’s a consequence of writing about foreign relations, diplomacy, history, and war for a lifetime, and having a pithy or sharp way of illuminating complicated concepts. Late last year, Rich wrote in a column, “In his masterly book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger observed, ‘Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.’”
In fact, Kissinger was almost a Yogi Berra of memorable quotes. Dismissing claims that he and the Nixon team habitually violated the Constitution, he quipped, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” “Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.” “Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.” “To be absolutely certain about something, you must know everything or nothing about it.”
One aspect of Kissinger that likely won’t get much attention, but that strikes me as a bizarrely incongruous aspect of his public persona, is the way that the cerebral, heavyset, heavily accented diplomat kept dating one famous woman after another:
During his bachelor days Kissinger was seen with actresses Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine, Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, Liv Ullman and Samantha Eggar, as well as Diane Sawyer, then a White House staffer and later an ABC News anchor. Those who knew him, however, said the playboy image was mostly a media creation.
Was it? I guess power really is the ultimate aphrodisiac. One more Kissinger quote: “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. Too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
Perhaps it was that during the Nixon years, the national-security adviser and secretary of state — Kissinger was the only man to serve in both roles simultaneously — could be in those roles and be a genuine celebrity, a figure of fascination, a man who was sometimes unpredictable. When’s the last time you heard anyone say anything like, “Hey did you see what Antony Blinken just said?” or, “You have to watch this Jake Sullivan interview”?
ADDENDUM: Our Jeff Blehar tracks the sad and yet somehow predictable decline of Greta Thunberg, once celebrated as the school-skipping “how dare you?”-thundering child prophet of the climate-change movement. Now, she’s straight up marching around pledging to “crush Zionism.” I saw one or two figures in the MSM scoffing that if you ever listened to Thunberg or treated her as a serious geopolitical thinker, that’s on you. Okay, but it wasn’t the Right that turned Thunberg into the face of the climate-change-activism movement.
The world of politics has easily created, exploited, and manipulated child stars, just the way the worlds of Hollywood and entertainment have. Remember how it seemed that every year at CPAC, there was some preteen wunderkind who had gotten some radio talk show because one of their stage-mom parents had gotten them to memorize some talking points? And just about every time, that teen grew up a bit, discovered girls, went to college, and within a few years was doing interviews with Salon or Politico or someplace and saying, “Oh, yeah, I don’t believe any of that anymore. Conservatives and Republicans are evil and totally wrong about everything”? How do those of us who have familiarity with children — you know, maybe having raised one or two or more — opt out of this cynical, exploitative process?
