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...
...It all began on January 20, 1961, when a wealthy young swell was inaugurated President of these United States...
...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...
...Fame was bestowed on medi ocrities, and fortunes were amassed "Audacity" was what Arthur Schlesinge thought characterized the Kennedy Ad ministration...
...Some say he prevaricated too much...
...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...
...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 can deal with them only conceptually, and the concepts are hardly elevated...
...All these years, Dr...
...Kissinger practiced his arts in Washington, a city whose population thrives on really idiotic delusions...
...The tactics pet formed as expected, but Dr...
...Had the deity snatched him up after his first thousand days his Washington neighbors might be repining for him at this very hour...
...Their mutters are becoming more audible...
...Apparently no nation is safe from his intrusions, but there is trouble...
...Into such a sink no truly self-respecting swindler would ever venture, yet late in 1968 Dr...
...The Brother Kalb even dreamt of higher office...
...His scholarly writings distinguished him as learned, perspicacious, and committed to sound values...
...As swindles go his bamboozling of the Washingtonians is about on a par with peddling a bogus biography of Howard Hughes to McGraw-Hill...
...Wha Dr...
...Lamentably, after nearly eight years in Washington he has violated practically every wise line he ever wrote...
...Kissinger was familiar with Wash ington's ways before he arrived...
...Nixon was ban ished to California, yet Washington stil celebrates the extravagant style and the specious values...
...Foreign potentates note some discrepancies in the great man's palaver, and apparently not even the citizens of Washington can be fooled forever...
...He journeyed to the lurid haze of Washington, and what has become of him...
...Poor Washingtonians patronize palmists...
...All of this is lamentable...
...Some cite this as evidence of his disrelish for democratic process...
...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...
...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...
...Charlatanry is acceptable and even obligatory for employment in any high government capacity...
...He realized tha Washingtonians would be defenseless when he brought his wit to the George town cocktail circuit...
...But when actual negotiations commence he blows up...
...Sometime early in the first Nixon Ad ministration—I leave it to historians to fi the precise date—Dr...
...The pundits were in thrall Soon they were crying for his appoint ment as Secretary of State...
...He ha( carefully calculated the potential power t( be realized by a plump, middle-aged pro fessor waddling hither and yon witl Hollywood artistes...
...Its sole indigenous industry is the production of empty rhetoric and costly confusion...
...Yet today his act merely curdles in theirminds...
...But a more plausible explanation for the woebegone Ph.D.'s sudden disesteem is that his shell game played too long...
...gap" to its jihad against Communise abroad and social injustice at home...
...And he had developed a facilir with sonorous evasions that was to sur pass the artistry of even the most sea soned local eminentoes...
...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...
...Kissinger has been scoring against easy marks...
...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...
...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...
...His telephone bugs...
...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...
...Sadness wells up within me...
...What is more, he has shown a curious ineptitude in his negotiations with foreign powers...
...But Dr...
...32 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976...
...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...
...truth, not all of its accomplishments wen vaporous...
...The magic has shaken from the wings of Dr...
...facile deceptions were not always his profession...
...Domestically Dr...
...Further, this inability to negotiate is of a piece with a larger incapacity, a political incapacity...
...The streets remaii aswarm with clever operators pursuini preposterous dreams of power, glory, an( boodle...
...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...
...Its extravagances are quietly admired in many Latin American capitals...
...it is simply unfair to hold his deceptions against him...
...others say he has given up on the West and that all he wants to do is quietly mollify the East...
...Still itis my melancholy burden to observe that his is not a glorious achievement...
...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...
...While in Cambridge he knew the Soviets well...
...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...
...In fact he does not even try...
...Others insist he botched on one too many airborne sorties...
...That they will get their wish I know for a certitude...
...Schlesinge and his kin put it down as "abuse o Presidential power...
...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...
...Now he has included the Middle East on his schedule, and he even swoops down upon the rising nations of Africa...
...Almost everything the Kennedy crowd produced wa illusory, from its election-year "missil...
...He understood the cachet stamped upon the man wh( lunches at Sans Souci with the ambigu ously talented celebrities of that singula vicinage...
...Kissinger is not receiving the boot for the right reasons...
...Kissinger hardly lande...
...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...
...His intellectual framing of a diplomatic problem is often sound and even brilliant...
...He be came a terrible nuisance in Saigon...
...Intellectually it is at one with Yellow Springs, Ohio, the location of Antioch College...
...Kissinger's 707...
...His temper tantrums...
...some suspect they have been had...
...Washington has never in this century been estimable for its advanced level of civilization...
...And socially it is a vast stew of ravening ambition, imbecilic values, and prehensile behavior...
...In Washington he forgot...
...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...
...His thespian nature, his fabled egotism, overwhelm him, and he becomes a monomaniac, panting for signatures...
...when the villainous Nixoi attempted to emulate it, Mr...
...His shabby treatment of colleagues...
...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...
...He flew t Rome, to Paris, and to London...
...Kissinger' greatest con still awaited the gram breakthrough...
...Kissinger began as an intellectual of genuine promise...
...Kissinger has been unable to marshal any popular support behind his policies...
...Eventually he was as popular in the new China as an American ping pong player...
...All he did was beguile eager chumps...
...for a change of toothbrush...
...With diligence and intelligence he brings his protagonists to an acceptance of his framework...
...They are generally formulae for manipulation, bereft of any higher purpose than self-aggrandizement and self-preservation...
...Kissinger's molting career can be explained solely in terms of Washington's delusions...
...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...
...I can think of no other city in either hemisphere where pretense is so lofty and talent so scrawny...
...When he succeeds he convinces them that his success is a work of sheer genius...
...Kissinger had discovered was th mysterious influence to be conferre upon a government official who remain airborne in a Presidential Boeing 707 Henceforth Dr...
...In a whirl of rhetoric, problem were set up that were not problems Ideals were celebrated that were beyonc fulfillment...
...Architecturally and culturally it is somewhat suggestive of Little Rock...
...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...
...All through Europe people speak of it in hushed tones...
...They work prodigious successes in Washington, but when Dr...
...Serious scholarship apparently made him restless...
...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...
...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...
...Kissinger hit upoi a discovery so stupendous that withi: months he was spoken of throughou Washington as "Super Henry," "Supe K.," etc., etc...
...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...
...Yet consider also his general furtiveness...
...It is the one aspect of this melancholy tale that gladdens my troubled heart...
...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...
...Here clearly is a man who does not like or respect people...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
