Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial/R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Master of Malarkey • Every charlatan knows that the easiest swindles are always put over on the stupidly corrupt, the dull riffraff of the world. That is why...
...Some cite this as evidence of his disrelish for democratic process...
...it is simply unfair to hold his deceptions against him...
...Charlatanry is acceptable and even obligatory for employment in any high government capacity...
...His scholarly writings distinguished him as learned, perspicacious, and committed to sound values...
...When he has fallen on his face overseas he has easily hoodwinked Washingtonians into accepting the notion that it was someone else who botched...
...Soon he will be hunkering out of town—a charlatan debauched by his own act, addicted to his own horse hairs, undone by the mores and the folkways of the vulgarians he manipulated so smoothly...
...It is the domain of the fourth-rater, abounding with fourth-rate chiselers, fourth-rate liars, fourth-rate thieves, and more lawyers per square foot than Lompoc, California...
...In fact Washington has more professional palmists than any other city of its-size in the country, a phenomenon little noted by local pundits but plainly observable to astonished visitors from more civilized parts...
...Its sole indigenous industry is the production of empty rhetoric and costly confusion...
...Kissinger has been scoring against easy marks...
...Kissinger set up his concession and he was soon able to congratulate himself upon becoming the town's number one attraction—a Barnum amongst Naders, a Bailey amongst Kennedys...
...In Washington he forgot...
...Foreign potentates note some discrepancies in the great man's palaver, and apparently not even the citizens of Washington can be fooled forever...
...He realized tha Washingtonians would be defenseless when he brought his wit to the George town cocktail circuit...
...when the villainous Nixoi attempted to emulate it, Mr...
...Rich Washingtonians patronize a much wider assortment of outlets for fantasy, starting with hundreds of units of the federal government and ending with spurious French restaurants that have more in common with the late Stork Club than with the Tour d'Argent...
...Some say he prevaricated too much...
...His temper tantrums...
...He journeyed to the lurid haze of Washington, and what has become of him...
...Architecturally and culturally it is somewhat suggestive of Little Rock...
...Kissinger has been unable to marshal any popular support behind his policies...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976...
...The pundits were in thrall Soon they were crying for his appoint ment as Secretary of State...
...Lamentably, after nearly eight years in Washington he has violated practically every wise line he ever wrote...
...Yet consider also his general furtiveness...
...Overnight the District of Columbia was transformed from a drab seat of government enveloped in a vaguely Southern drowse into an Eastern Seaboard version of Grauman' s Chinese Theatre...
...He understood the cachet stamped upon the man wh( lunches at Sans Souci with the ambigu ously talented celebrities of that singula vicinage...
...The magic has shaken from the wings of Dr...
...His shabby treatment of colleagues...
...Kissinger hardly lande...
...He has spent nearly eight years duping the most willing marks in the Republic, to wit, the congenital gulls who populate the Washington press corps, the halls of Congress, and the intellectual salons of that incomparable city...
...Kissinger hit upoi a discovery so stupendous that withi: months he was spoken of throughou Washington as "Super Henry," "Supe K.," etc., etc...
...Intellectually it is at one with Yellow Springs, Ohio, the location of Antioch College...
...It all began on January 20, 1961, when a wealthy young swell was inaugurated President of these United States...
...The streets remaii aswarm with clever operators pursuini preposterous dreams of power, glory, an( boodle...
...Almost everything the Kennedy crowd produced wa illusory, from its election-year "missil...
...some suspect they have been had...
...While in Cambridge he knew the Soviets well...
...Fame was bestowed on medi ocrities, and fortunes were amassed "Audacity" was what Arthur Schlesinge thought characterized the Kennedy Ad ministration...
...The resulting agreement is often sloppy and full of vague language, as SALT I, the Paris Accords, and the political elements of the Sinai agreement reveal...
...He flew t Rome, to Paris, and to London...
...In a whirl of rhetoric, problem were set up that were not problems Ideals were celebrated that were beyonc fulfillment...
...He had hoodwinked everyone from the villainous Richard Milhous Nixon to the pants pressers at the Washington Post, reporters whose very careers depend on crank calls from the bureaucracy...
...That is why it is so difficult to admire the attainments of Henry Kissinger, Ph.D...
...Yet today his act merely curdles in theirminds...
...When he succeeds he convinces them that his success is a work of sheer genius...
...Kissinger's 707...
...for a change of toothbrush...
...truth, not all of its accomplishments wen vaporous...
...I have it from learned anthropologists that legends from the fabulous city have even found their way into spiritual exercises practiced in the dank of aboriginal rain forests...
...His thespian nature, his fabled egotism, overwhelm him, and he becomes a monomaniac, panting for signatures...
...All he did was beguile eager chumps...
...Serious scholarship apparently made him restless...
...Its extravagances are quietly admired in many Latin American capitals...
...Kissinger practiced his arts in Washington, a city whose population thrives on really idiotic delusions...
...Still itis my melancholy burden to observe that his is not a glorious achievement...
...gap" to its jihad against Communise abroad and social injustice at home...
...Had he spent his life selling aphrodisiacs to high school boys or tracts of Marxian mumbo-jumbo to college students, I could have warmed up a little admiration for him...
...facile deceptions were not always his profession...
...Now he has included the Middle East on his schedule, and he even swoops down upon the rising nations of Africa...
...Wha Dr...
...Nevertheless, it is only in recent years that the entire city has given itself over to a single-minded and prehensile pursuit of delusion that has about it an aura of the metaphysically colossal...
...Apparently no nation is safe from his intrusions, but there is trouble...
...With diligence and intelligence he brings his protagonists to an acceptance of his framework...
...In fact he does not even try...
...Domestically Dr...
...After becoming a personage of the first water, he fell to his present dubious eminence: just another Washington pretender, a dutiful believer in the unbelievable, a devotee of conspiracies and sham...
...Here clearly is a man who does not like or respect people...
...others say he has given up on the West and that all he wants to do is quietly mollify the East...
...Eventually he was as popular in the new China as an American ping pong player...
...All these years, Dr...
...His intellectual framing of a diplomatic problem is often sound and even brilliant...
...That they will get their wish I know for a certitude...
...He ha( carefully calculated the potential power t( be realized by a plump, middle-aged pro fessor waddling hither and yon witl Hollywood artistes...
...It is the one aspect of this melancholy tale that gladdens my troubled heart...
...As swindles go his bamboozling of the Washingtonians is about on a par with peddling a bogus biography of Howard Hughes to McGraw-Hill...
...Washington has never in this century been estimable for its advanced level of civilization...
...The mob was laced with politicians of every cut, but it also contained burnt-out artists, intellectualoid speech writers, and—most pernicious of all—equal parts of Hollywood and Cambridge...
...Kissinger was familiar with Wash ington's ways before he arrived...
...Poor Washingtonians patronize palmists...
...Nixon was ban ished to California, yet Washington stil celebrates the extravagant style and the specious values...
...Their mutters are becoming more audible...
...Sadness wells up within me...
...Kissinger began as an intellectual of genuine promise...
...But a more plausible explanation for the woebegone Ph.D.'s sudden disesteem is that his shell game played too long...
...The tactics pet formed as expected, but Dr...
...Sometime early in the first Nixon Ad ministration—I leave it to historians to fi the precise date—Dr...
...Others insist he botched on one too many airborne sorties...
...He be came a terrible nuisance in Saigon...
...But when actual negotiations commence he blows up...
...His telephone bugs...
...What can be held against him is how quickly and thoroughly he contravened the wisdom he had once sought to inculcate in his Harvard students...
...What is more, he has shown a curious ineptitude in his negotiations with foreign powers...
...Further, this inability to negotiate is of a piece with a larger incapacity, a political incapacity...
...But Dr...
...Kissinger is not receiving the boot for the right reasons...
...Kissinger' greatest con still awaited the gram breakthrough...
...Into such a sink no truly self-respecting swindler would ever venture, yet late in 1968 Dr...
...It has had its worthy citizens, of course, and there have been noble experiments—the opening of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital comes to mind, and Coolidge's attempt to govern the United States between late breakfasts and early lunches...
...And socially it is a vast stew of ravening ambition, imbecilic values, and prehensile behavior...
...They are generally formulae for manipulation, bereft of any higher purpose than self-aggrandizement and self-preservation...
...Now he is preparing to close down his concession, not because the gulls of Washington are wise to his snake oil but because they thirst for a newer act...
...A (continued on page 32) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 197 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) first he had to sneak into Peking, but apparently the enormous airplane had the same fascination for Homo mao as it had for Washingtonians...
...Schlesinge and his kin put it down as "abuse o Presidential power...
...They work prodigious successes in Washington, but when Dr...
...All of this is lamentable...
...And he had developed a facilir with sonorous evasions that was to sur pass the artistry of even the most sea soned local eminentoes...
...Had the deity snatched him up after his first thousand days his Washington neighbors might be repining for him at this very hour...
...The Brother Kalb even dreamt of higher office...
...Kissinger had discovered was th mysterious influence to be conferre upon a government official who remain airborne in a Presidential Boeing 707 Henceforth Dr...
...Kissinger has to deal with the citizenry beyond or when he has to sit down with other competent manipdators like the Soviets or the North Vietnamese he is unhorsed...
...I can think of no other city in either hemisphere where pretense is so lofty and talent so scrawny...
...His earlier contretemps and his association with the hated Nixon are taking on a new significance in the eyes of powerful and high-minded Washingtonians...
...He can deal with them only conceptually, and the concepts are hardly elevated...
...After the most exacting contemplations, I can think of no more than eight useful and dignified individuals living within its bounds, and I am loath to divulge their names for fear that by doing so I may expose them to imminent bodily injury, perhaps even harassment by a Congressional committee...
...The Kennedys did leave Amer ica in the Indochinese war, and, wit] their Cuban missile crisis, they manage( to set off a costly and ominous arms race But for the most part all they bequeathe( to American government was a set o problems, a style of politics, and a publi philosophy of immense hypocrisy and de lusion...
...Kissinger's molting career can be explained solely in terms of Washington's delusions...
...All through Europe people speak of it in hushed tones...
...Attractive, hollow, and about as silly as Red Skelton, John F. Kennedy could not stand to be alone, and so he brought to Washington an entourage that made Harding's poker cronies look like the Founding Fathers by comparison...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
