Editorial / Henry Kissinger: Metternich Flummoxed
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Henry Kissinger: Metternich Flummoxed" Many believe that what the learned and immensely complicated Dr. Henry Kissinger really thinks of it all would make an...
...Here the giants' perennial smiles are put to a most exacting trial, for there is something about an evening of Brahms or Schumann that apparently roils the bowels of a fundamental sap—"why does it have to be so loud...
...From the day he graduated from Harvard Henry relished nothing so much as vichyssoise with the greats, and if the greats tended to drone on about palpable nonsense, so what...
...MILTON FRIEDMAN reminisces about Ludwig von Mises...
...But détente was raw meat for the Comrades, and itsconsequences must have made our Henry a stupendously derisory figure in their eyes...
...We offer a refreshing respite from the repetitious, wrongheaded opinions of the critical establishment and the subtle tyranny of "liberal" punditry...
...Obviously many of our national worthies are simply jackasses...
...Henry could always concentrate on the Oysters Rockefeller or the Corton Charlemagne...
...Henry Kissinger really thinks of it all would make an engrossing tale...
...It is a melancholy but well-researched truth that modern America confers celebrity and power most frequently on poseurs, quacks, and halfwits...
...At least since the palmy days of Camelot it has been an article of dogma in Washington that "the unpublicized life is not worth living," and so the giants are all in very thick with what the wretched Agnew was wont to call "the media...
...the Council on Foreign Relations...
...Probably he is a genius: one of those giants of modern America who perceive uncommon wisdom, liberality, and farsightedness in that which less sophisticated observers dismiss as mere trumpery, plausible but hollow beyond measure...
...Our editorial policy is vigorously anti-chic...
...Henry firmly believed—and with justification—that today in America one cannot get one's policies accepted without comforting these asses, and so he set out to conquer Georgetown...
...It was but the first of many public-spirited attempts to inform the Wonderboy of the serious nature of highballpolitik...
...I began as one of Henry's admirers, but as with so many other explanations for his behavior, these wither under scrutiny...
...Kissinger entertained errant thoughts, quietly computing to himself how many quarts of cement might seal off his garrulous hostess' mouth or speculating on how often the mansion's TIE Lift LY 0 UR "ENLIGHTENED" CENTURY has reduced the flame of Western Civilization to the merest flicker...
...An agitated Georgetown dowager reports her young nephew's most current judgment on the war...
...Foreign dignitaries collected Kissingerian whoppers as proof of their country's geopolitical significance...
...There are many who would disagree with that description of him, even in 1950...
...detente had survived...
...The Comrades ignored Henry's understanding of detente from the start...
...Might it be because Mr...
...I might add that the transcript of this and other statements Mr...
...He saw the Marxist conjurers for the cutthroat plunderers they were andalways must be...
...on the one hand, and the esoteric academic quarterlies on the other...
...He then commenced the most massive military build-up of all time, and soon his colleagues were raising hell throughout Africa and the Middle East...
...Upon leaving government eight years later he was fifty pounds too much for his shoes...
...Dulles claims it is, was meticulously researched, checked, and thought out...
...Detente came to be the centerpiece of Henry's foreign policy, and in humbug and hollowness it was perfectly tailored for the meaninglessness of the 1970s...
...But Dr...
...Some of the giants, naturally enough, are pols and bureaucratic mullahs, but many are above the fray...
...Paul Nitze, and recorded in my book, but Ms...
...Nitze, who was Dean Acheson's policy planning chief, can hardly be attacked as having "no experience in politics" ? Again, Mr...
...0 mores...
...Kissinger found wisdom in history and philosophy, and throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s he propounded sensible suggestions for scotching the Soviets' mischief...
...Oh well," one hears a glum Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., mutter as he drags' his fully-clothed bulk from yet another Kennedy swimming pool, "if it will get decency and enlightened liberalism a favorable word in Time or a picture in Town and Country, it's worth it...
...I would only add one more point...
...And all the assembled geniuses bask in the realization that only in Washington is such a gathering of "the best, the truly best in every field" possible...
...Yet in one of the quieter passages of his frequently quoted undergraduate thesis Henry had noted that: "Life involves suffering and transitoriness...
...THE NEW AMERICAN REVIEW's readers and contributors are a spirited conglomeration of crusty conservatives, classical liberals, Spenglerian doomsayers, country squires, educated paupers, humanists, humorists, "fed-up" middle-class taxpayers, earnest Grub Street toilers, aesthetes and decadents, stalwart Puritans, Thomist philosophers, neo-Augustans and other, less-classifiable, declaimers against the times...
...They planned geopolitical strategy together, conceptualized together, tapped telephones together...
...How did he accomplish all this...
...Native Washingtonians took his dissemblings as manifestations of his debonaire brilliance...
...We do not cater to the sleek, trendy, upwardly-mobile types courted by most "smart" magazines of our day...
...But Battle, as Dean Acheson's chief aide, was the prime mover in getting JFD into State as a bipartisan adviser and was a close observer of JFD's behavior throughout...
...Their fevered asininity was with them at birth...
...All around the world he has passed le sel et le poivre to our era's greatest notables...
...By 1974 the Soviets' Cuban mercenaries were crawling all over Africa, but 1974 was also the year in which Henry was acclaimed "the greatest person in the world today" by the callipygian contestants of the Miss Universe Pageant...
...Detente was catnip for the catnip-loving greats of the Washington Establishment...
...We will have improved our economy...
...Nervously they would exchange ominous morsels about the fiend's latest deviltry...
...In time they even prayed together...
...Leonard Mosley New York, New York Miss Dulles replies: Contrary to what Leonard Mosley writes, I have never been "desperate to restore" any "tattered reputation," so I shall not quote further from my correspondence with Princeton, Dean Rusk, Arthur Dean, or others who have given me true statements...
...The previously unpublished letters of Christopher Dawson...
...do you think Beethoven was very happy?...People didn't eat very well in those days...
...How had Henry become the most celebrated Secretary of State in modern times and the least effective...
...Others are lawyers, or super-lawyers as the muckrakers are given to calling them...
...07016 ^ Please Bill Me...
...DAVID PIETRUSZA warns of the rise of "The Electronic Presidency...
...Hence the giants have sacrificed much of their own privacy to allow the camera just a peek...
...These number into the hundreds, for there are more lawyers per square foot in Washington than in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, Danbury, Connecticut, or Lompoc, California...
...enry lied to practically everyone in our nation's capital and with a style transcending FDR at the height of his powers...
...But only the Boston Globe, National Review, and The American Spectator reported the speech...
...EDITORIAL Henry Kissinger: Metternich Flummoxed R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...It is so much easier, after all, to join the crowd in the street and simply drift with the times...
...Obviously Henry needed something more than intelligence and bromo-seltzer to become a modern Metternich...
...Now, at last, there is a magazine that offers intellectual and moral support for the thousands of lonely watchmen across the land...
...Washington's giants compose a kind of informal oligarchy duly overseeing power and celebrity throughout the city and defining the various formulae for acceptable style...
...Let the rumors blow in the wind...
...Dulles has dedicated herself to the task of defending her brother's reputation as a statesman at all costs, and I salute her for her loyalty...
...some of us don't even know Latin...
...It was one of those historic moments that so easily lend themselves to willful misinterpretation by anti-Communist Neanderthals, and Henry must have winced...
...Solemnly he reports the day's geo38 The American Spectator October 1978 political developments, as mounds of canapes disappear into the undulating folds of his face...
...Henry had Mr...
...He understood the complexity of modern American public life...
...The author of A World Restored and The Necessity for Choice knew something once, but once is not enough...
...but no one capable of reading a newspaper in the late seventies can believe that the time Henry spent boozing with them sweetened them up...
...Must public life as it is lived today stultify all who populate it...
...My further publications and recent additions to oral history are sources for serious students of past events...
...and, in the fullness of time, the White House—in whose mess he fattened so prodigiously that he became a hazard to revolving doors and a challenge to Air Force One...
...There are giants in the media too, and anyway one has to do one's part to keep the evening news interesting and the news-weeklies au courant...
...Kissinger has seen all this and more: He has seen the doe-eyed Daniel Ellsberg whipped into a shameful anti-Communist frenzy, and he has had wet kisses planted on both his cheeks by Egypt's President Anwar elSadat...
...His smiling presence had become as ubiquitous as Cubans in Africa, Soviet naval vessels in the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean, Red flags in Southeast Asia, and "Yankee-cough-up" diatribes at the UN...
...One columnist wrote a sagacious appraisal of the man, advancing the difficult proposition that Henry was: a) one of the town's most notorious liars and b) a uniquely trusted world figure...
...Henry's admirers attempt to explain away his artifice and appeasement by reminding us of his belief in the decline of the West and his skepticism about the strengths and uses of democratic politics...
...Neither is our journal limited in its scope...
...sick...
...Numerous chins overwhelmed the knot in his tie, and cardiologists all over the eastern seaboard were sending him their business cards...
...As one scribe has put it, "The New American Review fills a virtually empty niche between the glossy middlebrow magazines (Saturday Review & Co...
...How much dreadful vodka poor Henry consumed while convincing the wary Bolsheviki of detente's benefits will remain a mystery until some scholarly prof undertakes the definitive biography...
...Bloomington, Indiana 40 The American Spectator October 1978...
...The North Vietnamese were then flummoxing his every scheme, the Soviets had him by the short hairs, the world seemed alive with protesting adolescents, and poor Henry had to spend whole evenings listening to a nincompoop talk of her mother...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) despite nearly constant harassment from the silent majority, the Chamber of Commerce, and all those petty people given to calling themselves "taxpaying Americans...
...It has been estimated that for every cocktail party the administration has failed to attend one hundred thousand votes have been lost nationwide, along with choice pieces of legislation...
...Kissinger come to Washington with the character of a Solzhenitsyn he might have starved to death...
...The tawdry celebration of success, particularly financial success, has for decades been one of the less appealing aspects of American life, but the glorification of success by Washingtonians is a world removed from the bourgeois orgies of, say, the Rotary...
...Dulles makes no mention of these...
...How many other public persons could claim as much...
...Payment Two Years - $17.00 15 Burchfield Ave...
...In the end such acts grow tedious...
...There were clandestine missions to Paris, Moscow, Peking, and to the Georgetown quarters of the inscrutable Miss Barbara Howar...
...Harvard...
...No Secretary of State has ever known such distinction...
...We will have consolidated our position...
...pickle-dime charitable affairs at Hickory Hill, fund-raising dinners for various far-off, legal defense funds, and concertsat the famed Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—one of America's few examples of Middle Mussolini architecture...
...Still others are simple intellectuals, do-good lobbyists, militant heiresses, respected interior decorators, and people who seem to do nothing but attend Washington cocktail parties—a very solemn function indeed, as our embattled President has discovered...
...The patriots at Sans Souci have thrown up their hands...
...Had Dr...
...Enclosed Three Years $24.00 Cranford, N.J...
...And why not...
...He needed sound character...
...We think our role as "keeper of the flame" is a rather heroic one for a magazine...
...Yet the Baptist yokel is untutorable...
...Richard Nixon had never seen such violent devotion...
...Surely there were times when, as the saps gibbered fervently, a lonely Dr...
...Back in Washington it was cocktails as usual...
...That Ms...
...Nitze's remarks were, I need hardly say, referred back and approved by him before I used them...
...Considering the numbing hours Henry spent massaging such dreary oafs, it is amazing that he never became a drunk or a narcoleptic...
...We do not simply gnash our teeth and cry "0 tempora...
...Incidentally, some even more devastating comments about JFD's performance were made to me by Mr...
...And a decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that, come 1985, we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to...
...White House gossip had practically evaporated, there being few giants willing to claim a source in Nixon's administration, and the resulting sense of emptiness and powerlessness made their gatherings ever more subdued and melancholy...
...The Soviets, admittedly, are assiduous cocktail-party participants, but history has shown that for the loyal Soviet the cocktail party is merely an opportunity to get oneself raucously sozzled and one's capitalist guest...
...No person can choose his age or the condition of his time....The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor-camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers...
...Kissinger is the chronicle of how Bismarck was made presentable to Shirley MacLaine and David Susskind, how Metternich was made comprehensible to Walter Cronkite, and how Castlereagh was transformed into a mercurial buffoon...
...He kept the giants alive...
...One does not sweat and smile, turning one's whole life into a media event, and return with one's Weltanschauung intellectually in blossom...
...Perhaps these hours with Barbara were the cruelest of all...
...The biography of Dr...
...Some are journalists, well-known to the American public thanks to the frequency with which they award each other TV appearances and prizes for journalistic daring...
...Other occasions also receive the glare of publicity...
...But then, no one doubts that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is buoyed by strong character, and when he came to Washington not even Jerry Ford would dine with him...
...But Heinze Alfred Kissinger was different...
...Henry's arrival —always dramatically late—would send a rush of relief through the room...
...But when Battle remarked that he later wondered "whether I had given birth to a monster" by bringing JFD into the State Department, and whenhe added that "I felt that thanks to me, a man had been foisted onto the government who was a disaster for the United States," he was speaking, after deep reflection, 27 years later, in 1977...
...Rather we are • THOMAS MOLNAR attacks the ugliness of the modern city...
...RUSSELL KIRK looks to the Augustan Age for some lessons for our own day...
...Into all this woe came Henry, amusing, stimulating, and now crucial...
...A hush of grandeur settles about the erstwhile prof as he heaves off sizzling bons mots and follows up with sobering Hegelian vaporings...
...And so he trudged off to dinner at the Alsops, drinks at the Harrimans, and those intimate evenings with Barbara Howar...
...Dulles says he was "a young man with no experience in politics...
...bound together by an active dedication to the preservation of common sense, civilized standards, traditional values, and congenial virtues in an uncongenial age...
...In 1973 Brezhnev journeyed to Prague to assure an assemblage of Marxist-Leninist apes that "we are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist...
...The West may be in decline, but the East is in stagnation, and it is governed by large numbers of obvious meatheads...
...Battle made to me during a long conversation was sent to him for checking, corrected by him, and approved for publication...
...Surely he has seen many marvels: stormtroopers in old Furth, crestfallen stormtroopers in Allied Occupied Germany...
...Rather they are drawn together by a very modern sophistication, a worldly sensibility celebrating life and success and survival (continued on page 38) 4 The American Spectator October 1978 vealing the source of this particular story...
...Dulles herself and the tape and transcript of her remarks about it are available...
...Yet by night he dined and disported with the giants of the town...
...I doubt it...
...Surely behind today's drollery and politesse stands a man who could disclose some astounding truths...
...In terms of traditional American foreign policy goals of security and freedom of action, detente was a catastrophe, but in Henry's complicated political calculation it was a splendid triumph...
...It was to Henry's immense benefit that when he arrived in Washington prandial anthropology had already become a matter of vast consequence in our capital's political struggles...
...Full of progressive vision he went on to report that "we have been able to accomplish more in a short time with detente than was done for years pursuing a confrontation policy with NATO....Trust us, comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with detente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe...
...GEOFFREY WAGNER indicts the Sixties as "A low, dishonest decade...
...All I can say is that, since my book about them has been published, the "family network" has (with two notable exceptions) certainly come into play in an effort to damn and denigrate it...
...She particularly resents, it seems, my suggestion that a "family network" operated in Washington under Eisenhower when, simultaneously, Foster was Secretary of State, Allen was head of the CIA, and she ran the Berlin desk...
...In Washington one almost never mentions money, at least one never mentions the act of amassing money...
...Henry may have slayed those who write for the "Style" section of the Washington Post, but the North Vietnamese do not seem to have made cocktail parties a theater of operations...
...For the giants these were frightening years...
...The rapidity and thoroughness with which Henry was taken in by the mediocrity and bunkum of our Alexandrian Age should give every admirer of intellect cause for unease...
...Instead one celebrates the spending of it and that mysterious ontological state, fame...
...Many are the kind of people given to describing themselves as compassionate, decent, and liberal, but that is not to imply that they are ideologues...
...An intellectual fashion designer inquires about Nixon' s mental health...
...CP Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Kissinger liked to eat...
...Nevertheless there was news value in these trysts, and, according to Henry's grand strategy, he needed the ink...
...Had Henry been a man of sound character he might have forthrightly taken his case to the citizenry beyond Washington, he might have resisted the corruptions of that Alexandrian stew along the Potomac, and he might have spared us his melodramatic bellowings and blubberings...
...In point of fact he energetically set about fortifying their arsenals...
...The Wonderboy and his down-home clods had hardly unloaded their mules at Union Station when the Washington Post's learned Miss Sally Quinn delivered up a brisk treatise on the importance of the Washington cocktail party to American statecraft...
...As Henry understood it, Papa Brezhnev's first move would be to call off the North Vietnamese...
...The American Spectator October 1978 39 chief domestic must needs inspect her mistress' bathroom for unflushed toilets...
...Yet he was a scholar, one with a world view, and when he articulated that view, snatches of Wagner could be heard, occasionally even the Missa Solemnis...
...I have actually been to the Kennedy Center during an evening of Beethoven and can personally testify to having heard the following observations: "Ethel, there was something chillingly Naziish about that piece...
...We have a ready e3 e for fashionable humbug, and we're not intimidated by it...
...Henry's Spenglerian-Hegelian whim-wham may make Georgetown debutantes weep, but grownups become restless...
...They did not have to detune their cerebrums and take to amphetamines to render themselves acceptable to People magazine or to network television...
...ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG takes on the naysayers of religion...
...r INNIMUI111111111 Yes, I want to help keep the flame of the West alive, and I want to start by subscribing to The New American Review...
...0 There is opportunity in America...
...Our features can be enjoyed as well as pondered...
...There they would sit in one of their glittering townhouses, a manse now made sad by the Nixon madness...
...In a city devoted to deception Henry came to be its most warmly esteemed artist of flimflam...
...A special feature issue: The Collapse of Modern Architecture...
...By day he goosestepped through the White House, the most obsequious flatterer ever imagined in this democratic Republic...
...He recognized the Soviets as a tribe of pathological liars, and the world's meliorists made him laugh...
...AS 1 Name Address City State Zip Send to: One Year - $ 9.00 T.N.A.R...
...I can see him now centered in a halo of anxious faces...
...But that does not give her the right to twist or deliberately misinterpret my accounts of various phases of JFD's career...
...Instead he became Washington's premier attraction, and even out of office his mere presence can confer immortality upon a dinner party or an opening night...
...Moynihan fired, but by this time Mr...
...Washington is a city abundant with such giants, and one can never come to appreciate the sad stultification of Henry without understanding their mores and folkways...
...For example, she calls my description of his return to the State Department in 1950 "bizarre" and chides me for relying too heavily on the evidence of Lucius Battle who, she implies, was too young to have a balanced judgment...
...How can such contradictory claptrap issue from a stalwart of America's illustrious fourth estate...
...The bliss of Dante has been lost in our civilization...
...Moynihan could have run successfully for elected office from any of half a dozen states...
...It was, in fact, told to me by Ms...
...He warned that they would keep the world in a pother, and that there are in life dilemmas invincibly resistant to the therapies of social science...
...How Henry's mind must have wandered...
...Take, for instance, this sampling from recent issues: Join our growing list of readers today by clipping out the handy coupon at the right . . . and tell your friends about us...
...his assistant presidents remain locked in the White House, available only for special appearances at stock-car races and cow-chip heaves...
...All Washington idolized him, and those who had worked for him were either keeping their mouths shut or filing law suits against him...
...Yet, though cocktail parties are a crucial political arena in the higher reaches of modern America, they apparently do not loom so large internationally...
...Washingtonians reverenced his charms, and it is suggestive of the complicated minds that flourish along the Potomac that many of them actually grew to trust him...
...THE NEW AMERICAN REVIEW is a bold young bimonthly journal of opinion that defies the prevailing winds and, if successful, could very well reverse the ominous trends of our time...
...Born with a brain and the good sense to use it, he, in his salad days, had held to sound ideas, however ploddingly expressed...
...Anyway from July 1975 to February 1976 Henry was given a vivid demonstration of democracy's vitality when his own UN Ambassador roused Americans to resist the pecksniffery of the UN's tinpot despotisms...
...America has as many morons as the next country, but by the late 1970s only George McGovern remained adamantine in proclaiming the peaceful aspirations of Ivan the Terrible's heirs...
...Nixon was in JFK's bathtub, he was populating Washington with what appeared to be Jaycees from some weird Midwestern state, and Rolling Stone had revealed that he planned to cancel the presidential elections, which meant the conventions too, and maybe even the inaugural ball...
...Those of us who, for various reasons, stand watch over that flame sometimes find ourselves overcome by the loneliness of the vigil...
...This letter has gone on long enough, and I hope I have demonstrated that my book, far from being the "fiction" Ms...
...In each issue we focus upon a variety of fields, running the gamut from movies and television to literature, art, philosophy, international politics, and religion...
...It was an audacious course, for the cachet of a Harvard prof loses everything when the prof is in the employment of the hellish Nixon—which Henry was...
...its sophistry and obfuscation were perfectly congenial to their insulationist mentality...
...Dulles objects to my opinion of her brothers is herright, and I respect her faithfulness to their memory...
Vol. 11 • October 1978 • No. 10
