Posted on 2-12-2002

Kiss-inger Of Death
By Maureen Dowd, NYT, 1 Nov02

It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside the box.

Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who
used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks? Who better to ferret out
government duplicity and manipulation than the man who engineered secret
wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups, and still ended up
as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?

It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically
opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of
Henry Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of
the Ford and Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old
Dr. Strange—— I mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.

There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the
9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much
Metternich as Machiavelli. They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's
résumé: keeping the Vietnam War going for years after he realized it might
be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's
murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President Richard Nixon, telling him
he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers running the
Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to track
down leaks on the Cambodia bombing. If you look for the words "Kissinger"
and "secret" in the same sentence in Nexis, the search cannot be completed;
there are too many results. When he was dating Jill St. John and Liv
Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac, he even coyly called
himself "a secret swinger."

In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade:
"deceitful," "disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum,"
"flatterer," "two-faced" and "secretive." The über-diplomat has even been
criticized for dissembling in his own memoirs. But secretiveness is not a
disqualification for jobs in this White House. Quite the contrary: only the
clandestine and the conspiratorial need apply. Mr. Bush, after all, worked
very hard to suppress any investigation of 9/11. He had to cave to the
victims' families, who were hellbent to hear what the president learned in
his August 2001 briefing about Al Qaeda plans, and what wires were crossed
at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and I.N.S. Now Mr. Bush can let the commission
proceed, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on
a single dark corner, or failed to flatter a boss, in his entire celebrated
career. (He was one of Mr. Bush's patient tutors in foreign policy during
the campaign.)

If you want to get to the bottom of something, you don't appoint Henry
Kissinger. If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of
something, you appoint Henry Kissinger.

Mr. Bush learned about the diplomat's black belt in the black arts long
ago, when he made a patsy of Bush père. As the ambassador to the U.N. in
1971, Bush 41 was accused of aggressively making the case for Taiwan and
against Beijing, even as Mr. Kissinger, the national security adviser, was
secretly traveling to Beijing and undercutting Taiwan. Afterward, Mr.
Kissinger told George H. W. Bush he was "disappointed" that Beijing had
gotten Taiwan's seat in the U.N. "Given the fact that we were saying one
thing in New York and doing another in Washington," Mr. Bush drily
observed, "that outcome was inevitable." Fortunately, Bush Jr. was not held
back by the revulsion that many in his generation have for Mr. Kissinger's
power-drunk promotion of bloody American adventures abroad. As the former
fraternity president told GQ magazine, he stayed a retro 50's guy through
the roiling 60's: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time
at Yale."

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's principles: that
the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S. media, that American
diplomacy may be happily indifferent to American public opinion, that the
great unwashed masses of our democracy are just a big old drag on the
elites who know what's best, and that corporate pals are a help, not a
hindrance, in government work.

For this administration, outside the box is inside the box.