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{Politics.Archive.507.1}: mutual fundamentalist {paracletus} Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:59:46 EST (65 lines)
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<a href="http://nymag.com/news/people/24750/index.html">The Once and
Future Kissinger</a>

 As another failed war threatens to tarnish his legacy, Henry
Kissinger attempts to clarify his record—by evading, skirting,
stretching, hedging, and stonewalling like the diplomatic master he
is.

f Kissinger wants a record, it’s because he wants to correct it. As
he nears the end of his public life, yet another disastrous war
threatens to taint his legacy. State of Denial, the latest White House
exegesis by famed reporter Bob Woodward, depicts Kissinger as
privately advising President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick
Cheney on the war in Iraq, calling him a “powerful, largely invisible
influence.” Woodward’s portrait of Kissinger as a surreptitious
Rasputin, cooing in the presidential ear that “victory is the only
exit strategy,” urging him to resist all entreaties to change course,
has rankled the dour statesman.

Barbara Walters, who calls Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” was
entertaining Kissinger and his wife at a dinner party for a D.C.
politician when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who died last year,
suddenly piped up, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”

The subject of Kissinger’s past sins was very much in the air at the
time. Judges in both France and Spain were seeking Kissinger for
questioning as the long-simmering debate over his connection to
Chilean general Augusto Pinochet’s brutal killing of dissidents in the
seventies returned with a vengeance, not least in Christopher
Hitchens’s ringing indictment, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. These
developments clearly rattled Kissinger, who had preemptively written a
lengthy article for Foreign Affairs decrying the dangerous legal
precedent of using universal jurisdiction to try state actors for past
actions (the same precedent under which German courts hope to try
Donald Rumsfeld).

Friends say Kissinger’s entire life since leaving public office has
been an incessant justification of his time in power, a meticulous
shaping and reshaping of his legacy. “He never stops paying attention
to his own reputation and record,” says a New York colleague who has
known him since the seventies. “Never.”

“He wants to control not just what he says,” observes Woodward, who
first interviewed him for 1974’s All the President’s Men, “but
people’s perceptions of what he says. And it’s kind of like one long
book review where he is arguing with the reviewer of his book or his
life or his policy.”

Seymour Hersh, who wrote the 1983 Kissinger takedown The Price of
Power, is more damning: “He lies like most people breathe.”

But many people think Kissinger still has much to answer for, namely
his actions during the Nixon and Ford years in Cambodia, Chile, East
Timor, and Cyprus, not to mention Vietnam. For Kissinger, the details
are always too complex to really hold him to account. Having watched
Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, an extended look at former
secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s grappling with his failures in
Vietnam, Kissinger says, “I thought he sold himself short. I thought
he oversimplified and didn’t give himself enough credit.”

Kissinger himself is not one to make apologies. When I ask him if his
thinking has evolved since Vietnam, he is quiet for a few moments.
Finally, he says, “I mean, you can say there was a harshness to
realism that was mitigated over the years; it’s a beautiful thing to
say. It does not accord with what my intellectual record is.”

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