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...
...Obviously many of our national worthies are simply jackasses...
...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...
...Henry Kissinger really thinks of it all would make an engrossing tale...
...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...
...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...
...Yet the Baptist yokel is untutorable...
...Had Dr...
...All around the world he has passed le sel et le poivre to our era's greatest notables...
...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...
...Hence the giants have sacrificed much of their own privacy to allow the camera just a peek...
...It was one of those historic moments that so easily lend themselves to willful misinterpretation by anti-Communist Neanderthals, and Henry must have winced...
...We will have consolidated our position...
...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...
...In Washington one almost never mentions money, at least one never mentions the act of amassing money...
...Let the rumors blow in the wind...
...It is so much easier, after all, to join the crowd in the street and simply drift with the times...
...ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG takes on the naysayers of religion...
...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...
...It was, in fact, told to me by Ms...
...its sophistry and obfuscation were perfectly congenial to their insulationist mentality...
...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...
...But only the Boston Globe, National Review, and The American Spectator reported the speech...
...Rather we are • THOMAS MOLNAR attacks the ugliness of the modern city...
...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...
...There are many who would disagree with that description of him, even in 1950...
...Native Washingtonians took his dissemblings as manifestations of his debonaire brilliance...
...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...
...Dulles says he was "a young man with no experience in politics...
...Considering the numbing hours Henry spent massaging such dreary oafs, it is amazing that he never became a drunk or a narcoleptic...
...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...
...RUSSELL KIRK looks to the Augustan Age for some lessons for our own day...
...The author of A World Restored and The Necessity for Choice knew something once, but once is not enough...
...Moynihan fired, but by this time Mr...
...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...
...Our editorial policy is vigorously anti-chic...
...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...
...How did he accomplish all this...
...How many other public persons could claim as much...
...Numerous chins overwhelmed the knot in his tie, and cardiologists all over the eastern seaboard were sending him their business cards...
...Those of us who, for various reasons, stand watch over that flame sometimes find ourselves overcome by the loneliness of the vigil...
...These number into the hundreds, for there are more lawyers per square foot in Washington than in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, Danbury, Connecticut, or Lompoc, California...
...EDITORIAL Henry Kissinger: Metternich Flummoxed R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...But Dr...
...He saw the Marxist conjurers for the cutthroat plunderers they were andalways must be...
...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...
...We do not cater to the sleek, trendy, upwardly-mobile types courted by most "smart" magazines of our day...
...How can such contradictory claptrap issue from a stalwart of America's illustrious fourth estate...
...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...
...Other occasions also receive the glare of publicity...
...Bloomington, Indiana 40 The American Spectator October 1978...
...Their fevered asininity was with them at birth...
...0 There is opportunity in America...
...Henry's arrival —always dramatically late—would send a rush of relief through the room...
...his assistant presidents remain locked in the White House, available only for special appearances at stock-car races and cow-chip heaves...
...Incidentally, some even more devastating comments about JFD's performance were made to me by Mr...
...But détente was raw meat for the Comrades, and itsconsequences must have made our Henry a stupendously derisory figure in their eyes...
...Neither is our journal limited in its scope...
...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...
...A special feature issue: The Collapse of Modern Architecture...
...Dulles herself and the tape and transcript of her remarks about it are available...
...In the end such acts grow tedious...
...Surely there were times when, as the saps gibbered fervently, a lonely Dr...
...Kissinger liked to eat...
...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...
...DAVID PIETRUSZA warns of the rise of "The Electronic Presidency...
...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...
...Battle made to me during a long conversation was sent to him for checking, corrected by him, and approved for publication...
...It was but the first of many public-spirited attempts to inform the Wonderboy of the serious nature of highballpolitik...
...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...
...MILTON FRIEDMAN reminisces about Ludwig von Mises...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Nitze's remarks were, I need hardly say, referred back and approved by him before I used them...
...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...
...In time they even prayed together...
...As one scribe has put it, "The New American Review fills a virtually empty niche between the glossy middlebrow magazines (Saturday Review & Co...
...Obviously Henry needed something more than intelligence and bromo-seltzer to become a modern Metternich...
...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...
...Dulles makes no mention of these...
...Enclosed Three Years $24.00 Cranford, N.J...
...We have a ready e3 e for fashionable humbug, and we're not intimidated by it...
...The bliss of Dante has been lost in our civilization...
...Richard Nixon had never seen such violent devotion...
...Surely behind today's drollery and politesse stands a man who could disclose some astounding truths...
...They planned geopolitical strategy together, conceptualized together, tapped telephones together...
...In point of fact he energetically set about fortifying their arsenals...
...The Comrades ignored Henry's understanding of detente from the start...
...Born with a brain and the good sense to use it, he, in his salad days, had held to sound ideas, however ploddingly expressed...
...CP Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Yet, though cocktail parties are a crucial political arena in the higher reaches of modern America, they apparently do not loom so large internationally...
...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...
...We think our role as "keeper of the flame" is a rather heroic one for a magazine...
...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...
...Harvard...
...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...
...I doubt it...
...This letter has gone on long enough, and I hope I have demonstrated that my book, far from being the "fiction" Ms...
...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...
...Foreign dignitaries collected Kissingerian whoppers as proof of their country's geopolitical significance...
...All Washington idolized him, and those who had worked for him were either keeping their mouths shut or filing law suits against him...
...enry lied to practically everyone in our nation's capital and with a style transcending FDR at the height of his powers...
...Kissinger come to Washington with the character of a Solzhenitsyn he might have starved to death...
...Detente was catnip for the catnip-loving greats of the Washington Establishment...
...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...
...We do not simply gnash our teeth and cry "0 tempora...
...I would only add one more point...
...In a city devoted to deception Henry came to be its most warmly esteemed artist of flimflam...
...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...
...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...
...the Council on Foreign Relations...
...I began as one of Henry's admirers, but as with so many other explanations for his behavior, these wither under scrutiny...
...07016 ^ Please Bill Me...
...An intellectual fashion designer inquires about Nixon' s mental health...
...The West may be in decline, but the East is in stagnation, and it is governed by large numbers of obvious meatheads...
...But Heinze Alfred Kissinger was different...
...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...
...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...
...AS 1 Name Address City State Zip Send to: One Year - $ 9.00 T.N.A.R...
...That Ms...
...Nitze, who was Dean Acheson's policy planning chief, can hardly be attacked as having "no experience in politics" ? Again, Mr...
...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...
...sick...
...Dulles objects to my opinion of her brothers is herright, and I respect her faithfulness to their memory...
...I can see him now centered in a halo of anxious faces...
...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...
...0 mores...
...detente had survived...
...Yet by night he dined and disported with the giants of the town...
...One does not sweat and smile, turning one's whole life into a media event, and return with one's Weltanschauung intellectually in blossom...
...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...
...do you think Beethoven was very happy?...People didn't eat very well in those days...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...And why not...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The previously unpublished letters of Christopher Dawson...
...Back in Washington it was cocktails as usual...
...For the giants these were frightening years...
...Payment Two Years - $17.00 15 Burchfield Ave...
...some of us don't even know Latin...
...He recognized the Soviets as a tribe of pathological liars, and the world's meliorists made him laugh...
...An agitated Georgetown dowager reports her young nephew's most current judgment on the war...
...We will have improved our economy...
...There were clandestine missions to Paris, Moscow, Peking, and to the Georgetown quarters of the inscrutable Miss Barbara Howar...
...Henry could always concentrate on the Oysters Rockefeller or the Corton Charlemagne...
...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...
...They did not have to detune their cerebrums and take to amphetamines to render themselves acceptable to People magazine or to network television...
...on the one hand, and the esoteric academic quarterlies on the other...
...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...
...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...
...Some of the giants, naturally enough, are pols and bureaucratic mullahs, but many are above the fray...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Must public life as it is lived today stultify all who populate it...
...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...
...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...
...He understood the complexity of modern American public life...
...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...
...Nervously they would exchange ominous morsels about the fiend's latest deviltry...
...Nevertheless there was news value in these trysts, and, according to Henry's grand strategy, he needed the ink...
...How had Henry become the most celebrated Secretary of State in modern times and the least effective...
...How Henry's mind must have wandered...
...As Henry understood it, Papa Brezhnev's first move would be to call off the North Vietnamese...
...Surely he has seen many marvels: stormtroopers in old Furth, crestfallen stormtroopers in Allied Occupied Germany...
...The patriots at Sans Souci have thrown up their hands...
...There they would sit in one of their glittering townhouses, a manse now made sad by the Nixon madness...
...bound together by an active dedication to the preservation of common sense, civilized standards, traditional values, and congenial virtues in an uncongenial age...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The American Spectator October 1978 39 chief domestic must needs inspect her mistress' bathroom for unflushed toilets...
...By day he goosestepped through the White House, the most obsequious flatterer ever imagined in this democratic Republic...
...Henry's Spenglerian-Hegelian whim-wham may make Georgetown debutantes weep, but grownups become restless...
...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...
...Paul Nitze, and recorded in my book, but Ms...
...We offer a refreshing respite from the repetitious, wrongheaded opinions of the critical establishment and the subtle tyranny of "liberal" punditry...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Others are lawyers, or super-lawyers as the muckrakers are given to calling them...
...A hush of grandeur settles about the erstwhile prof as he heaves off sizzling bons mots and follows up with sobering Hegelian vaporings...
...Upon leaving government eight years later he was fifty pounds too much for his shoes...
...Yet in one of the quieter passages of his frequently quoted undergraduate thesis Henry had noted that: "Life involves suffering and transitoriness...
...Our features can be enjoyed as well as pondered...
...It is a melancholy but well-researched truth that modern America confers celebrity and power most frequently on poseurs, quacks, and halfwits...
...Henry had Mr...
...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 claims it is, was meticulously researched, checked, and thought out...
...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 biography of Dr...
...My further publications and recent additions to oral history are sources for serious students of past events...
...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...
...Might it be because Mr...
...Now, at last, there is a magazine that offers intellectual and moral support for the thousands of lonely watchmen across the land...
...No Secretary of State has ever known such distinction...
...He kept the giants alive...
...Perhaps these hours with Barbara were the cruelest of all...
...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...
...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...
...He needed sound character...
...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...
...But that does not give her the right to twist or deliberately misinterpret my accounts of various phases of JFD's career...
...Into all this woe came Henry, amusing, stimulating, and now crucial...
...And so he trudged off to dinner at the Alsops, drinks at the Harrimans, and those intimate evenings with Barbara Howar...
...I might add that the transcript of this and other statements Mr...
...Instead one celebrates the spending of it and that mysterious ontological state, fame...
...GEOFFREY WAGNER indicts the Sixties as "A low, dishonest decade...
...Moynihan could have run successfully for elected office from any of half a dozen states...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 11 • October 1978 • No. 10
