New Kissinger Bio Shows Banality of Dr. Evil

November 2nd, 2015

Awake Goy

November 2, 2015

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How, apart from his gravitas-bearing accent, did Kissinger pull off this feat? Part of the explanation was that Kissinger was not original; he was, for the most part, conventional. Virtually everything he wrote during his surprising climb to fame in the 1950s was either a) the taken-for-granted wisdom of his time (the Russians, a revolutionary power, were always coming), or b) nonsense (a passage from his diary: “Spiritual force, multiplied by economic force, multiplied by military force, is roughly equal to security”); or–and here is where some originality crept in–c) wild-eyed hysteria in the face of the USSR’s conventional military might and its accumulating nuclear bombs….

In 25 small-print pages in a 1987 Appendix to Sideshow, [William] Shawcross amply demonstrated that Kissinger was a serial liar. He lied in 1970 about the Cambodia bombing. When, in 1979, the interviewer David Frost, working for NBC, and Kissinger, looking angry, admitted to making a public statement then that was “not correct,” Kissinger moved “heaven and earth” to convince NBC executives to eliminate this exchange from the broadcast. He called them “dozens of times,” Shawcross wrote. He lied, and covered up, and lied about lying and about covering up. Examples are legion; see, for example, accounts by Nick Thimmesch, Bob Woodward, Walter Isaacson, Seymour Hersh, Rep. Joshua Eilberg, and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others. This is a man who does not stint at self-taxidermy or taking evasive action. An authorized rebuttal published under the name of Kissinger’s amanuensis, Peter Rodman, smeared Shawcross for “political apologetics” and called it “obscene.” Pot, meet kettle.