Tag: Henry Kissinger

NYT Public Editor Says NYTBR Conflict of Interest Is a Conflict of Interest

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, writes a quietly devastating critique of the preferred authorized biographer writing a review of the authorized biography of Kissinger: In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true. But what is also true is that Mr. Roberts had what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s first choice to write his authorized biography. The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of that fact before the publication of a Gawker piece that […]

Clusterfuck of Corruption at NYT Book Review

Greg Grandin takes to Gawker to report on a clusterfuck of corruption at the New York Times Book Review: This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. The reviewer is Andrew Roberts. Roberts brings an unusual level of familiarity to the subject: It was Roberts whom Kissinger first asked, before turning to Ferguson, to write his authorized biography. In other words, the New York Times is having Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer review Kissinger’s authorized biography. … Oh, and Roberts isn’t just close to the subject of the book he is reviewing. He has also been, for a quarter-century, a friend of the book’s author. … The Times, too, normally checks those things. When I’m approached about […]

Machtpolitik

From Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: Douglas Brinkley: You called Henry Kissinger a genius, and you get a kind of twinkle whenever you mention Kissinger. What is it about Henry Kissinger that you found so— Alexander Haig: You don’t think there is something between us, I hope. Brinkley: I don’t know. Greg has the best footnotes.

When Henry Edited Hannah

In the early 1950s, Henry Kissinger edited the journal Confluence. Among the writers he published there was Hannah Arendt. Their editorial relationship was fraught. His edits were heavy; her resistance, strong. Here she responds to his attempted edits on August 14, 1953: I fear you will be disappointed to see from the galleys all sentences which you wrote were eliminated and quite a few of my own sentences re-instated….I realize that your editorial methods—re-writing to the point of writing your own sentences—are quite current….I happen to object to them on personal grounds and as a matter of principle. If we had given this matter a little more thought, you might have decided not to want this, or any of my manuscripts, which […]

No Safe Havens: From Henry Kissinger to Barack Obama

Thomas Schelling at a meeting of 12 prominent Harvard professors with Henry Kissinger in May 1970, just after Nixon had announced the invasion (though not the secret bombing) of Cambodia: As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand. We just don’t know which one is scarier. As Greg Grandin​ points out in Kissinger’s Shadow, from which I got this quote, Kissinger/Nixon’s justification for invading (and secretly bombing) Cambodia was to ferret out the “sanctuaries” that this neutral country was providing to the enemy in Vietnam. Today, that doctrine is widely accepted among America’s ruling and chattering classes: no “safe […]

I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings

I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings: We charge this Offender with…nothing, that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle; that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, died in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core….We charge him with nothing, that he did not commit upon deliberation;…They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice…. …We have brought before you the Chief of the tribe, the Head of the whole body of Eastern offenders; a Captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny, in India, are embodied, disciplined, arrayed, and paid. This is the person, my […]

It’s 9/11. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is?

Readers who grew up in the New York area in the 70s will remember the “It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?” tagline.   Well, it’s 9/11, the 40th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende. Do you know where Henry Kissinger is? Update (11:30 am) Turns out, we do: he’s meeting with John Kerry about Syria.

Rimbaud Conservatism

All this talk of arming teachers and training children to rush psychopaths who are outfitted with machine guns semi-automatic weapons reminds me of a moment in high school. But first, a recap. In the wake of the Newtown killings, writers on the right have suggested we should teach children to turn on their assailants, rushing them en masse. Here’s Megan McArdle writing in The Daily Beast: I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even […]

Protocols of Machismo, Part 2: On the Hidden Connection Between Henry Kissinger and Liza Minnelli

Yesterday, I posted Part 1 of this excerpt from Chapter 9 of The Reactionary Mind. Today, I post Part 2. • • • • •   What is it about being a great power that renders the imagining of its own demise so potent? Why, despite all the strictures about the prudent and rational use of force, are those powers so quick to resort to it? Perhaps it is because there is something deeply appealing about the idea of disaster, about manfully confronting and mastering catastrophe. For disaster and catastrophe can summon a nation, at least in theory, to plumb its deepest moral and political reserves, to have its mettle tested, on and off the battlefield. However much leaders and […]