MOMENT: KISSINGER AS DISRAELI?
WILLS, GARRY
MOMENT KISSINGER AS DISRAELI? GARRY WILLS In 1878, when Benjamin Disraeli returned from the Congress of J e r l i n , he addressed welcoming :rowds from the balcony of 10 Downng Street...
...But he said, " O h , no...
...Even that was a revival of the permanent aristocratic dream of a patriot king (as Bolingbroke had called it...
...Before World War II, when Henry Kissinger was not yet an American citizen, he began his college work at night school, training himself to his father's livelihood as an accountant...
...Nothing is of so much importance and of so much use to a young man entering life as to be well c r i t i c i z e d by women...
...He does not care a rush whether the revenue increases or declines...
...Nix went back to Washington and attended no other UN business for the Secretary's department...
...He tried, instead, to outflank the opposition to him...
...He sensed the religiosity in, for instance, the period's cult of Toynbee...
...maintaining our power in E u r o p e . " Power is sxperienced less as a personal and endangered thing if a man identifies his own power with the whole nation, and then wields that against other nations...
...He was the professor to Rockefeller's people, and the politician back among his students...
...What Kissinger and Disraeli both wanted from the country was support for their foreign policy...
...The adolescent Disraeli had to scrape up enough knowledge to suggest a familiarity he did not possess...
...Stanley Hoffman describes his organization style this way: " H e has no strong right hand, just lots of weak left feet...
...Cambodia is bombed without public acknowledgement...
...John Manners, a disciple of Disraeli during the Young England period, said of his hero: " D i z z y ' s attachment to moderate Oxfordism [ i . e . , Puseyism] is something like Bonaparte's to moderate Mahomedanism...
...He too represents himself as "different" in most social and political circles...
...The avoidance seems deliberate, and Disraeli would understand...
...What made Nixon an outsider was precisely his personality...
...The line of thought suggested then has survived Nixon's fall—it is taken as a guide for the new conservatism in Kevin Phillips's recent book, which never mentions Kissinger...
...Acting alone, by secret diplomacy, abrupt reversals, sudden coups de theatre, he expanded England's empire, despite an anti-atrocity campaign mounted by war critics...
...One wonders if Kissinger — having been for so many years a semiChristian and a secret Jew, having spoken so often for the Center from the periphery, having become an antiintellectual intellectual and an antinationalist superpatriot — is anyone, anymore...
...Kraemer assured Kissinger that " g e n t l e m e n " do not attend NYU — and K r a e m e r ' s accent always makes " g e n t l e m e n " sound like "Christian gentlemen...
...He finds Toynbee's scheme valid insofar as it approximates Dante's (136, 236), a scheme in which "God incarnate as Man, the Savior, leads Humanity towards a new Jerusalem" (232), toward "the Kingdom of God, with Christ as King" (235...
...He was learning a language, a set of signals, that would say his Jewishness did not matter, that he shared the assumptions of those Christian gentlemen around him...
...In his recent address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he deplored the cynicism to be found " i n the large urban centers, and especially among presumptive l e a d e r s . " But, as a spokesman for the patriot king, he hopes that the people will know enough to support the rulers who know how to take care of them: " W h e n one ventures away from Washington into the heart of America, one is struck by the confidence, the buoyancy, and the lack of any corrosive criticism...
...There are no stabilizing assumptions about him — or, perhaps, within him...
...He was a classical nineteenthcentury diplomat, who believed in the balance of power...
...Robert Blake describes his efforts: " H e had the run of his father's vast and learned library, and it was during this time of his life that he began to acquire the wide if somewhat shallow knowledge of history and literature that was to characterize his thought and writing all his d a y s . At the same time he endeavoured to turn himself into a classical scholar, but it is doubtful whether he ever really attained the knowledge of classical authors which he was inclined to claim in later life...
...That enabled the two younger ones to attend Winchester, making a university career possible...
...His books include vJIXON AGONISTES, and BARE RUINED ZHOIRS: DOUBT, PROPHECY AND RADCAL RELIGION...
...The promise of hope comes from the new, not the old Jerusalem: The bliss of Dante has been lost in our civilization...
...He affected Turkish styles, popular with the aristocracy in that romantic period...
...The postwar period was a time of heightened religious awareness, and young Kissinger — writing to please Christian Scientist Bill Elliott, Episcopalian Carl Friedrich, and Missouri Synod Lutheran Fritz Kraemer — was thoroughly aware of the mood...
...in political economy, the hottest subject at the time, in the most fashionable college, Jowett's own Balliol...
...To make things worse, all three of the men Kissinger took as subjects for his long senior paper — Kant, Spengler, and Toynbee — had undergone a thorough classical training, and used myth and symbol from that body of knowledge as the language of their systems...
...Never from Isaiah or the Book of Job...
...Having positioned themselves a little bit outside each circle of humanity—in order, paradoxically, to speak for the tongue-tied Center of each — they try to speak for everyone and seem to end by not being anyone...
...Still, he was dealing with large institutions and inertial forces of the past—the Church, the Empire, the Queen...
...Kissinger paraphrases this aspect of Toynbee's work, with apparent approval...
...But elsewhere he describes this metaphysical thinking as the sound part of his work, the Kantian and valid part, as opposed to a weak gesturing at the empirical...
...Kissinger, too, claims to speak for the Center from his eccentric place in politics...
...Detached...
...They, too, will rally you on many points, and as they are women you will not be offended...
...Kissinger told his teaching assistant, "Perhaps this is the time Kissinger is obsequious to those above him . . . cruelly demanding to those under him — and evasive of close contact with real equals...
...If he resembled anything in continued on the following page KISSINGER this situation, it was Queen Victoria, reclusive and petulant, susceptible to flattery...
...Carl Friedrich was a committed advocate for two independent states at the time — Israel and Puerto Rico — and his student asked him: "Why do you waste your time on such people...
...He acquired a lame by writing books, before enterng politics under various patrons from Wyndham Lewis to Robert 3 e e l ) , some of whom he turned on...
...He did not mean to encourage any further Russian steps into the Balkans...
...But by the time he reached Harvard he was an anti-Zionist, and no one ever saw him at the Cambridge temple or the campus Hillel Foundation...
...Benjamin, not baptized till he was bar-mitzvah age, just changed from one obscure boarding school to another after his baptism, and never attended a respectable public school (or university...
...He was trying to impress them, and was very sensitive to their own religious terms...
...Disraeli was not hailed in his own time for the Reform Bill (which most observers thought showed him at his trickiest, betraying Peel as well as principle), but for the splashy international accomplishments — the swift and secret purchase of Suez Canal shares, the crowning of Victoria Empress of India, the acquiring of Cyprus...
...Yet Kissinger skirts comment on the man in his writings as regularly as he avoided comparison with him in the White House...
...Yet few people share these admirations now, or the categories in which they made sense...
...Among analysts, he suggests the political realities and electoral necessity...
...Jew and Christian were not relevant categories within his thinking on power relationships...
...When a black congressman from Pennsylvania, Robert N. C. Nix, sixteen years a member of the House, became a delegate to the UN, he found himself sitting by Henry Kissinger at a general session where there was over an hour to spend before business began...
...He has never identified himself with any minorities...
...Dante is, everywhere in the paper, the touchstone of wisdom (238-9...
...That was an age of parliamentary classicists, of Jowett's students who became politician-dons...
...Dizzy's own view was confessedly that of a character in his novel, Endymion: "Look at Roehampton...
...Since English forms p l u r a l s by adding s, he reasoned backward to a new singular, a " p o l i" (p...
...When Seymour Hersh first began looking into reports that Kissinger had spied on his own staff, Henry told him on the phone: " H ow could I do that, after what my relatives suffered at the hands of the State...
...Thus Kissinger has ignored the one kind of knowledge he had a headstart in...
...Disraeli was often compared to Nixon...
...Kissinger approves of the way concepts like Withdrawal-and-Return "rest, in the first instance, on the life of Christ" (245) — and says that, if the Jews failed by rejecting Christ, the Greeks failed symbolically at Athens, when they rejected the preaching of St...
...Though he treats phenomena as a singular (171), he believes that dilemma is plural (183...
...Disraeli cultivated the exotic, and was often referred to as " O r i e n t a l . " But he was careful to adopt a style identified with Byron, a personal hero and model for him...
...The People are not s t r o n g ; the People never can be strong...
...It might seem unfair — though it would be difficult to decide which man was being wronged — to compare Kissinger with Disraeli, since the latter became a Christian, a high church man, a great defender of the established hierarchy...
...And this is just the aspect of his work that gets the Kantian's nod of assent ( 2 3 2 - 3 ). Even dealing with Spengler, Kissinger singles out that moody poet's use of C h r i s t i a n images — e . g ., Christ's journey to Jerusalem (115) or his confrontation with Pilate (241...
...He became not only aristocratic in his eccentricity but in his concern for the Tory center...
...He is the man...
...Lacking integration and avoiding assimilation, they seem to float about the edge of other people's lives, making technical analyses and witty comment...
...3arry Wills writes on politics for THE ^EW YORK REVIEW, ESQUIRE, and varous other magazines...
...But during the war, as a young draftee, he met Fritz Kraemer, a classically trained super-Christian who liked to quote the New Testament in the original Greek...
...Kissinger is obsequious to those above him (a Kraemer, an E l l i o t t , a Rockefeller, a Nixon), cruelly demanding to those under him—and evasive of close contact with real equals...
...Carl Friedrich refused to vote a summa for the paper because it was too pretentious...
...Playing one power against another, exercising leverage from outside . Both men have been followed by rumors of betrayal, most of them unjust...
...He wrote his own rules: " I n society, never think...
...A government in Chile is knocked off...
...The formula relayed to Nixon by Daniel Patrick Moynihan was taken from one of Disraeli's novels (Coningsby): "A sound Conservative government...
...n Sybil, when his heroine suggests that the people may be learning their own s t r e n g t h , Egremont corrects her: "Dismiss from your mind those fallacious fancies...
...It would be odd if it didn't — which makes it doubly odd that it hasn't...
...Conversion was common in those years of c r u s a d e against " a t h e i s t i c communism," when many people moved from Marx to Christ (e.g...
...Hersh found that convincing, and withheld some early material on Kissinger...
...Reading all this, one might suppose Kissinger was considering a change of religion...
...When Henry started asking her a string of questions about various contemporary artists, she tried to tell him whatever she knew...
...Whittaker Chambers, the author of that Time cover story...
...He had prayed with his Orthodox father throughout his boyhood, and spent two hours a day in guided study of the Torah...
...brand new ones would be " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " — disorderly, unmanageable...
...After two tries on his own, he finally gained a seat in Parliament through the intercession of Mrs...
...But all that mattered to him was Russia's temptation to come in on the side of the Christians...
...Great powers interested Kissinger, as the bastions of legitimacy...
...It was a loss he regretted, one he did not inflict on the alterego heroes of his novels...
...but this is understood with others, and resented in both Kissinger and Disraeli...
...He is thinking of real politics: foreign affairs...
...Both men were surprised to hear they held that rank, and Richardson could only suggest (feebly) that his wife had once invited Henry to their home...
...The point is not that he, like Disraeli, made schoolboy errors in accidence (though " p o l i " and " g e n i " are extraordinary errors for a Harvard senior majoring in politics and history...
...He liked to present himself as embodying Matthew Arnold's formula for Western civilization — Hebraism and Hellenism within a Christian framework...
...or speaks for anything...
...When the franchise had to be expanded, he wanted the Tories to get some credit for it...
...This gives him a certain freedom of maneuver in most circumstances, and a leverage upon those circumstances...
...Henry, so anxious to oblige the Christian gentlemen, never showed concern about the civil rights movement...
...Besides, he was the first man of Jewish ancestry to become Prime Minister of England...
...He labored in his father's library to repair the loss...
...but Kissinger somehow acquired the notion that polis is the noun's plural (which is poleis...
...Does this record suggest parallels in the life of America's first Jewish Secretary of State...
...His brother, his teachers, his friends all deny that...
...Among diplomats he is the scholar, and among scholars the diplomat...
...Little states were bad enough...
...Even today, Kissinger likes to impress a Reston or an Alsop by quoting Aeschylus in translation and saying that he formed his ideas of historic inevitability from Greek tragedy...
...That would not have been surprising in such an atmosphere of deference to Christian pieties...
...Insofar as Disraeli had a set of domestic principles (in his Young England period), they were these — and Byron would have approved...
...translating and annotating...
...His excesses were always Byronic...
...He seems to have been c o n v i n c e d , from the outset, that this would not impress the Christian gentlemen of Harvard...
...Among politicians, he is above votegrubbing and just offers an analysis...
...He has retained his German accent (unlike his brother), and did most of his graduate and undergraduate work in German history and philosophy...
...He has practised a slight personal displacement that makes him not quite part of any one scene — he is from Washington when at Harvard, and from Harvard when in Washington...
...That is a little odd in itself...
...Toynbee claimed that Judaism declined when its elders rejected the challenge of Christ's coming—a milder " c u l t u r a l " reading of the old Patristic charge that deicide had been followed by divine judgment...
...Kissinger has instinctively made a series of analogous decisions...
...His native Furth had been a center of Orthodoxy and of Zionism—and he had belonged to the most rigorous of the seven synagogues in town...
...Oxon...
...While suppressing all references to his Jewish childhood, he has emphasized his German ties—which are no disadvantage in the academic world...
...He was too shrewd to settle for mere assimilation — a tactic that would not work for him...
...One is kept wondering what he will do next — but one also begins to wonder if there is anything he wouldn't do next...
...Worshipping a past greatness, that had been sterilized by the self-adoration of the "Chosen people," Jewry was unable to accept the greater treasure offered to it by Christ (191...
...He did not see it as a way for the people to take power over themselves...
...It is hilarious to see Kevin Phillips trying to make Disraeli, now, a model for playing the middle against the top and bottom, against " t h e Establishment...
...When passing the later Reform Bill, he was simply bowing to necessity, as Peel had done before him...
...His favorite quotations tend to come from the '*wisdom l i t e r a t u r e " of the Greeks...
...The art of strategic self-displacement is harder to bring off in this century, in this country...
...In America, he had been required to concentrate on his study of English...
...When he moves on to modern " p r o p h e t s , " he cites Spengler, not Buber or the Baal Shem...
...It was unfairly said of him that he did not care for the dead twelve thousand because they were Christians...
...Willam Buckley, who was there, describes the scene: "During the course of the hour and one half that Representative Nix sat cheek by jowl with Mr...
...Kissingerdoessay, on page 140ofthis paper, that T o y n b e e ' s reading of Jewish history exemplifies his imposition of metaphysical patterns on empirical evidence...
...Conversion was a necessary step for one who wanted to hold office in Victorian England...
...He supported the despotic Turkish regime as a check to Russia, and deplored any attempt to moralize when dealing with power relations...
...Kissinger specialized in nineteenth-century diplomatic history, on the great period extending from the Congress of Vienna to the Berlin Congress...
...But Moynihan, that student of ethnicity, must realize that what made Disraeli an outsider was his Jewish name and background, a political disadvantage he overcame by the force of personal charm—and especially of charm exercised on Queen Victoria...
...He arrived at Harvard without the kind of education his mentors respected and shared...
...Carl Friedrich, his tutor before the Elliott days, was a product of Heidelberg, as familiar with Leibniz's timeless Latin as with Kant's eighteenth-century German...
...Kissinger exchanged with him not one word, taking him — one supposes — to be the delegate of the United Republic of T a n z a n i a , and suspecting — one gathers — that he spoke only Swah i l i . " Mr...
...The point is that he, like Disraeli, was in a great hurry to affect familiarity with a whole cultural code-system...
...Sometimes a little knowledge of Latin betrays him more than total ignorance would...
...The lack of male friends and confidants is the mark of men steering such a lone course that they cannot trust another to interpret them...
...so, not understanding either gender or declension, he makes the plural of genus not genera but geni (148...
...That helps explain Kissinger's lack of interp r e t e r s ; it also suggests that the categories are not understood because they no longer apply...
...he wanted to Join the Club — literally as well as symbolic a l l y . In the summer of 1959, a Washington club was under attack for excluding blacks, and some members had resigned...
...Gladstone, no matter what the press of business by day, returned to his Homer at night, Disraeli's shade haunted Nixon's White House for six years, f I itting here and there deceptively, but never settling anywhere near Henry Kissinger...
...And Kissinger was no longer a devout Jew when he returned from the war...
...In the army, he taught a specialized and rather advanced kind of history before he had absorbed a basic knowledge of the past...
...and all the stress fell on this great imperialist's domestic policy, " T o r y Reform...
...When Barbara Raskin went to interview Kissinger for the Washingtonian in 1970, he recommended that she call on Elliot Richardson and David Packard, since they were his best friends in Washington...
...His personal mobility was pitted against, and ballasted by, the conservative powers he wished to wield...
...Besides, Nixon was not the brilliant minister, manipulating his own ruler...
...Disraeli, by outflanking the opposition, was able to j o in it...
...Disraeli's father, a rebel from his own family's commercial success, became an English literary gentleman...
...Kissinger's first wife was by that time moving from Judaism to the Ethical Culture Society...
...GARRY WILLS In 1878, when Benjamin Disraeli returned from the Congress of J e r l i n , he addressed welcoming :rowds from the balcony of 10 Downng Street with these w o r d s : ' ' W e have >rought you back, I think, peace with l o n o u r . " This was a man who, conidered alien, made himself fashionibly exotic, a fop and dandy in the Jeau Brummell mold...
...And the center of that wisdom is theological, a resignation to the divine will (257, 337...
...Nixon seemed to like the idea of himself as an outsider coming into office and beating the "establ i s h m e n t " at its own game...
...While warning professors against the right-wing backlash, he also warns " t h e people" against intellectuals...
...This is the way to gain fluency, because you need not care what you say, and had better not be sensible...
...He was the Jew who had accepted Christ, avoiding the stigma of those who had not...
...The Turks.were at the time gentle rulers over Jews...
...Disraeli, after softening his name from d'lsraeli, spent his early years wangling invitations to the great English country homes, where he practised the arts of ingratiation...
...The teaching assistant whom he had asked about the club in 1959, Abigail Thernstrom, is a knowledgeable student of modern art...
...If a Rockefeller satellite, even of the more remote sort, had been sitting anywhere within view, Kissinger would have shown a deference he could not manage for the black man sitting next to him...
...Kissinger had been uprooted from Germany before he could acquire the solid classical education that country still offered in the thirties...
...There is no evidence that Henry ever considered baptism...
...Andre Maurois notes how few were Disraeli's male friends, and how well his arts of flattery, of bantering, served him when he gained Victoria's confidence...
...He did not want to join a church...
...His numerous errors of grammar, syntax, and accidence suggest that in Greek he never advanced far...
...Though he began to speak at Harvard in a semi-Christian rhetoric, he presents himself, at times, as a vestigial Jew...
...During his first year at Harvard, a Time cover story (written by Whittaker Chambers) said that Toynbee, as " t h e champion of the remnant of Christian civilization," was teaching this valuable lesson: " O n l y one transfiguring Savior has ever appeared in human history: Christ — the highest symbol of man's triumph through ordeal and d e a t h . " Kissinger, in his own work, would interpret Toynbee through Dante (as Artzybasheff had on the cover of Time), and praise him as the modern St...
...Kissinger himself has avoided the Disraeli comparison, though an earlier speechwriter, Ralph de Toledano, started calling Nixon the new Disraeli as early as 1960...
...The Christmas bombing occurs for reasons different from those stated...
...And the answer is inescapable...
...The monarchy has often tried to appeal past Parliament to " t h e people," to play top and bottom off against the middle...
...for me to get a membership...
...Kissinger has for many years suppressed any tendency to focus on his Jewish background—and Disraeli did that, too...
...A similar use is made of Dostoievski's Christian vision ( 2 3 - 4, 278...
...After having divined a truth of eternal validity in the sublimity of the One True God, Israel fell into the error of conceiving its temporary spiritual eminence as an eternal Divine sanction...
...He likes to think in nineteenth-century and European terms...
...But even Disraeli's friends, those who had sincere religious convictions, doubted that his conversion, undertaken at his father's insistence when he was thirteen, was anything other than social— i.e., just the kind of vague Christian language Kissinger labored to perfect in his senior paper...
...If deficient in other ways, he was already a diplomat in embryo...
...He would be exotic, but on his own terms, in ways that would appeal to the English taste for eccentricity rather than a fear of aliens...
...Moynihan's attempt to make Disraeli a philosopher of internal reform was misguided from the outset...
...Augustine: "The disintegration of civilizations merely exhibits the condition for a higher experience, for the vision of the supramundane reality which is of and beyond this world, the City of G o d ." Kissinger devoted 126 pages of his paper to Toynbee, and nowhere found space for the misgivings many Jews expressed about his treatment of the ancient Jewish state...
...His three sons were baptized into the Church of England...
...In a country-house world of colonial governors gone slightly native, he moved easily...
...always be on the watch, or you will miss many opportunities and say many disagreeable things...
...Henry Kissinger, too, always concentrated on the women in any gathering, and welcomed the flirtatious teasing of his " s w i n g e r " reputation in the sixties — a modern equivalent of Disraeli's " d a n d y " pose...
...For years he alone managed foreign affairs under a complying monarch...
...He had young disciples but few male friends...
...We are a nation of displaced persons, and further displacement out from us risks the loss of any gravitational tie at all...
...Now he says, " I got t o o k . " It is not an unusual thing to hear from people who have dealt with Henry...
...At Harvard, Kissinger sought out, in William Yandell Elliott, another odd combination of Christian fundamentalism (Elliott was surely one of the few pious Christian Scientists teaching in the Ivy League) and classical sophistication (he was a Rhodes scholar who stayed to get his D . Phil...
...A worldwide military alert is called, and then called off, and no explanation is given, then or after...
...This is the best school...
...Talk to women, talk to women as much as you can...
...The question arises, in the case of both men, whether they have practised the art of self-displacement a little too effectively...
...Scripture quotations, when they occur, are from the New Testament— " h e who would save his soul, let him lose i t " etc...
...He knows that nouns like equus become equi in the plural...
...I must check into t h a t . " A man insensitive to the demands of Israelis and Puerto Ricans will hardly trouble himself about the plight of blacks...
...Kissinger lives in a different world...
...Kissinger, Mr...
...But this describes merely a fact of decline and not its necessity (348...
...He is hard to anticipate because impossible to define...
...Blake writes of Disraeli: " H e instinctively lacked sympathy with small nations struggling to be free...
...Castlereagh never had the independence of action, or the imagination, of a Disraeli...
...When the Turks slaughtered twelve thousand citizens, including women and children — the closest thing to genocide in that period — Disraeli laughed at "atrocitaria n s " like Gladstone, and called his rival's pamphlet on the affair the one real Bulgarian atrocity...
...Which returns us, necessarily, to the question: Who is Disraeli, in such an equation...
...And, if one approves of Empire, one has to admit he wielded them well...
...He was for the church, and country homes, and the landed interests...
...He must go everywhere, and make every deal, and conduct every briefing, in person —others would misrepresent him, miss his nuance, tangle him up in concerns that are not his...
...If Disraeli took an aristocratic dandy for his model (Lord Byron), Kissinger took an aristocratic swinger for his—Prince Metternich...
...Oh yes, I understand: Tory men and Whig measures...
...A vote for king and country would give power to those who could take care of the people...
...Write me a memo on i t . " She thought he intended to buy a painting or two, but as the questions and memos continued— he could not afford, then, to buy on so broad a scale — it became obvious he was doing his homework on the one subject that most engages Nelson Rockefeller...
...Kissinger tried to suggest a familiarity with that world in his paper, " T he Meaning of H i s t o r y . " The Greek word for city, polis, is very important to political scientists, as the mere name of their discipline suggests...
...Kissinger attempts an easy and frequent use of Latin phrases — vis inertiae becomes vis inertia (151), " a data of history" does service for " a datum" (161...
...When Kissinger plays a lone hand — with Russia and China, with Japan and Europe, with Saigon and Hanoi, with Cairo and Jerusalem — there are no governing factors of Empire and monarchy to guide and check him...
...Disraeli's shade haunted Nixon's White House for six years, flitting here and there deceptively, but never settling anywhere near Henry Kissinger...
...Disraeli, too, while generally playing down his Jewish origin, referred to it when he found that useful...
...And Spengler's more profound insights are certified by their resemblance to Dante's thinking (116...
...But what of his reputation for reform...
...But, while he emphasized the role of Castlereagh in the first C o n g r e s s , he dwelt only on Bismarck's place at the second...
...All diplomats, of course, have to tailor their words to different audiences...
...When he made the Grand Tour to the Mediterranean, it was a pilgrimage in the steps of Byron, and he praised Jerusalem as second to Athens...
...But, to many, that sounded as if he were not only everything to everybody but anything to anybody...
...Paul (252...
...Wyndham Lewis...
...He sees himself as a lonely cowboy righting the world's wrongs for it, because it is too dumb to do that itself (or even to take part in his own effort for its sake...
...A famous Harvard classmate of Henry's (and later, as Secretary of Defense, a sometime rival) — James Schlesinger—gave up the Jewish faith to become a Lutheran in his senior year of college...
...Partly this is a result of their secretive and lonely style — and their inability to deal with peers...
...without any criticism, either voiced on his own part or noticed in the surrounding literature: The idolization of the ephemeral self led Jewry to disaster...
Vol. 1 • June 1975 • No. 2
