Happy Birthday, Dr. Hank
Kent - To this beautiful New England village near the New York-Connecticut border, home to the great designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife Anette, both very old friends of mine. Two even older friends, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, were already there, making it a perfect house party. The de la Renta house is a jewel. Beautifully manicured rolling lawns, grand old trees and topiaries amid thick woods remind one of Oxfordshire, but the plumbing works, the furnishings are priceless and the staff impeccable. Lots of dogs, yes, but without moths stuck on the windows, no mud or urine stains in the drawing room, and the showers work, a perfect Anglo-American country house combining the best of the two cultures.
The piece de resistance was a surprise to me: Nancy Kissinger’s birthday party for her hubby Henry in their nearby house, also in Kent. I had decided to abstain from alcohol in order not to embarrass myself as it was my first visit and I was a guest of a guest to boot—but, alas, I did not keep my word. The wine was too good to miss, and the Kissingers too interesting for yours truly to make polite and sober conversation. I was one away from the birthday boy and addressed him as Dr Kissinger. Greeks of my generation were taught not to be familiar with people we didn’t go to school with, and I followed my grandfather’s advice to the letter. Up until the second bottle of red, that is.
That’s when I began to call him Dr Henry. He was very funny about it. “We are regressing,” he told no one in particular, “Soon I will be Hank....” Kissinger told me something very interesting when the subject of Greece came up. In the summer of 1974 the White House was in disarray, to say the least, “and the last thing an embattled President Nixon and I needed was two NATO allies going to war with each other.” Kissinger haters might say that he would say that, but they’d be wrong. Kissinger got along with the tricky Makarios; in fact the Cypriot president had given more to the Turkish minority than Kissinger had asked him to. What would have been the point of overthrowing him in order to replace him with a Greek-Cypriot hothead like Nick Sampson, a clown at best, or Greek Colonel Ioannides, the true architect of the coup, a nationalist-paranoid? My first book, The Greek Upheaval, dealt with Cyprus at length, and I had come to that conclusion way back then. But try and convince most Greeks that Nixon and Kissinger were totally innocent of the charges. We Greeks used to blame the gods for our self-induced disasters. For the last forty years we’ve been blaming Uncle Sam. The Cyprus debacle was hatched in Greece and the Americans had as much to do with it as Paris Hilton has to with propriety and dignity.
During post-prandial drinks Iraq was discussed. Again, Kissinger has had a lousy rap about the greatest foreign policy disaster of American history. For starters, he had nothing to do with it. Wolfowitz and Feith convinced Cheney who convinced W. When Kissinger was brought in for advice, it was already much too late. All the good Dr Hank says now is that America cannot suddenly pull out because there will be a regional crisis. In this he’s in agreement with Gates and Rice and the generals in the Pentagon who have long been skeptical that the Iraqi government would use the opportunity created by the troop increase to reach genuine political accommodations. Kissinger thinks that the goal should not be a military solution which cannot be imposed, but a way to provide security so the Iraqis can move toward political reconciliation.
All I know is that there’s bound to be great instability in the short term. A realist, like Kissinger has always been, believes that the Iraqi Security Forces would not survive as a nonsectarian national institution without American troops. Which means neighbouring countries would interfere and a regional war would break out. I’ve met Kissinger many times before but this was the first time I had an opportunity to speak to him up close. Hacks being predictable, he was always described as “Metternichian-Bismarckian-Machiavellian.” There are worse names I can think of. He was also known for practicing “metaphysical politics,” which attempts to impose a reality on a situation which is subjectively perceived. Again, nothing wrong with that if one’s a statesman.
What makes me laugh are so called serious historians. This Robert Dallek chappies has just written how Nixon called Kissinger “my little Jew boy,” and Henry called Nixon “that inebriated paranoiac.” Many friends of mine in the know throughout the years deny ever having heard Kissinger call Nixon anything else than “the president,” and if Nixon called “Hank” a Jew boy, I’m the world’s most gullible fool. Dallek knew that by writing such drivel he’d make sure his book would sell, so presto. Dallek makes Taki look like Gibbon. Kissinger was hated by the left because he understood the Left ...the frantic search for social solutions and economic panaceas and so on. He wrote early on about “the experience of freedom, which enables us to rise beyond the suffering of the past and the frustrations of history.” This will get you nowhere with Trotskyite-neocon-leftists. They like to regulate our lives.
Metternich is, to those who know history, something of a hero. Had it been Trotsky upon which Kissinger modelled himself, he’d have a lot less dirt thrown at him by people not good enough to wipe his boots.
--The Spectator
Comments
Wasn’t “Dr. Hank” responsible for coining the phrase “the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad”?
George Ajjan
http://www.georgeajjan.com
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isn’t there something cheap and vulgar about Taki.
Incidently, the true fallout from the Napoleonic wars
in statesmanship was indisputably Talleyrand and
not Metternich. Kissinger the Jew must reread his
history.
alam
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While Taki’s votaries march off to war, Taki executes an impeccable “volte-face” and hacks his way back to his digs at “740 Park”, to enjoy a bespoke meal of “caviare aux blinis” with “the best damn demographic” (including, ugh! ‘Dr. Hank’) east of Secaucus. Tallyho! Rabble.
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it would take more than a second bottle of menashevitz to impress me
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Taki reports “When Kissinger was brought in for advice, it was already much too late” with respect to Iraq. One wonders at what point Kissinger would like Taki and the world at large to believe that he (Kissinger) was “brought in”? Was Dr. Henry brought in just after American troops entered Baghdad, when Cheney or Rumsfeld or somebody decided to fire General Jay Garner as viceroy of Iraq and replace him with Kissinger’s protégé and partner, Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, the Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, Inc.? Is that when Kissinger entered the picture? If so, then we have a problem.
Why? Because everything went downhill fast from that point, so fast that it almost seems as if someone were deliberately throwing a monkey wrench into the proceedings to accelerate the downward trajectory. Who in the Pentagon or at the White House was ultimately making the disastrous decisions which Bremer dutifully carried out that turned the nascent American occupation of Iraq into a ten alarm disaster, a disaster for which we and the Iraqis on the ground are paying the price today?
Nominally, it was Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, in association with Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law, fellow Likudnik Elliott Abrams, who was (and remains) in charge of the Middle East desk at the National Security Council, but where does Dr. Henry fit into this puzzle?
We know from Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial”, that G.W. Bush “met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.” Moreover, did not Bush’s mentor, the CEO of the Bush Administration, Dick Cheney, remark to Woodward that, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and I guess at least once a month, Scooter [Libby] and I sit down with him.” At least that is what Woodward states on page 406. Is Woodward making it up?
For this and a myriad of other good reasons, a full scale Congressional investigation cries out to be undertaken of the entire “Operation Iraqi Freedom” affair from start to finish. Perhaps then we will we be able to determine if Dr. Henry has been given “a lousy rap” or if he deserves enormous behind-the-scenes credit for this unfolding fiasco.
Patrick Foy
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Touché! Foy. But you’re the wrong Demographic, old boy. It’s that second big balloon of brandy which emulsifies Taki’s clarity, and temporarily turns the Greek one into a singing swine rhapsodizing over the treacherous Kissinger. Maybe the Rabble can reorient the poor little lost one. Congress? You’re kidding! We know who controls Congress. Congress is the Charybdis to Kissinger’s Scylla. This my grandfather told me. Good work, Foy old boy.
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It’s precisely because Kissinger is not a great man - precisely because he’s such a mediocrity, a bolt-headed mechanical-minded bureaucrat - that I’m disinclined to attribute too much blame to him for any fiasco. Kissinger is far too dull-witted to be anything other than a cog in a vast machine, upon whom too much blame AND praise have been nonsensically projected in this era which mistakes publicity for greatness.
Comparing him to Metternich is nonsense.
Kissinger is 100 percent a man of the degraded, intellectually and culturally decadent late 20th century - as De Gaulle perceived and expressed so rightly when De Gaulle treated Kissinger with unceremonious scorn on their first meeting in 1969, “Why the hell don’t you get out of Viet Nam right now?” And Kissinger’s buffoonery and vapid intellectual pretensions would have made him a laughing stock in the circles of Metternich.
But I never cease to admire Taki for how he defends his friends, even if sometimes he wears blinders to do so.
As I’ve said before, if Jesus accepted the hospitality and friendship of prostitutes and other reprobates, then a mere mortal like Taki has no reason to be snobbish toward mediocrities like Kissinger. Call Taki what you will, but mean-spirited he is not.
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Taki seems to have some rather selective memories. Robert Dallek’s comments about Kissinger were based on the actual Nixon White House tapes and other government documents that also reveal that the arch Zionist Kissinger assumed virtual control of the US government during the Israeli War of 1973. He did this by simply eliminating Nixon and his closest confidents from the chain of command and assuming the presidential powers himself. This was a war where the US became very heavily involved supplying Israel with arms just so that Israel could retain the territory that it had stolen in the Six Day War or 1967.
I am afraid that Kissinger is just as odious as his critics contend. After leaving his political appointment, Kissinger then benefited greatly from his influence pedaling as head of Kissinger Associates. In this capacity he help lobby for some of the most despicable regimes on earth, including the Indonesians in their genocide against the Timorese.
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Yes, Jesus welcomed the demimonde into the fold. But Jesus had harsh words for the Pharisees (Kissinger, Neocons, Israel Lobby, et al.): Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him two-fold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matthew 23:15). You’re outflanked on three sides, Ball; you better make a run for it
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Blustone wrote (under his pseudonym):
“You’re outflanked on three sides, Ball; you better make a run for it”
HA! Oh, man, you made my day!
I still can’t even figure out which “three sides” you mean. Were you sharing a friendly but awkward joke with me? Or if you were really serious, it made no sense at all. In my above comment, I:
1. Took Taki to task for his naive admiration of Kissinger, while still paying respect to our host Taki for how he chivalrously defends his friends,
2. Suggested that we should all pay less attention to Kissinger, because Kissinger is just a mediocrity and a media-creation
3. Mentioned a Gospel story about how Jesus was not a snob, and so EVEN a mediocre buffoon like Kissinger can have some friends.
So, WHAT? Heh, WHO the hell would even
BOTHER to “outflank” me for that?
Dude. Mr “Bluestone”, it seems I could teach YOU a few things about diplomacy.
;-) :-)
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Foy, John F. and Bluestone – all three of us – consider Kissinger treacherous, capable of doing great harm, of sowing dragons teeth; not merely an innocuous mediocrity. Do not underestimate your enemies, mate. Also, this making Jesus into Casper Milquetoast is repugnant. Diplomatically yours, Bluestone (nom de guerre).
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To “Bluestone”:
You pathetic coward. HA! HAHAHAHA!
Ohh...you have proved that you’re not even worth fighting against, either verbally OR physically.
You wrote: “Do not underestimate your enemies, mate.”
HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, God! HA!
I’m not underestimating you. If you’re too cowardly to post comments under your own real name, then it’s obvious to me that you’re a weak little coward.
And, what, did you SERIOUSLY think I would ever be INTIMIDATED by a coward who won’t even post his own name? HA!
You, you coward “Bluestone”, can talk to my favourite parrot:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=twbT3TwKBBI
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And PS, to “Bluestone’s” threat to me:
Who is “John F?” (Whom “Bluestone The Pseudonymous” listed among my “enemies, along with himself and Mr Foy whom I respect hightly.)
I know who Mr Foy is, and I have great respect for him even if I disagree with some of what he writes. Mr Foy is a real Gentleman and a real scholar, as far as I can see.
I might disagree with Mr Foy about Kissinger’s alleged crimes - just like I
disagree with Taki about Kissinger’s putative resemblance to geniuses like Metternich.
But Mr Foy is a great scholar and a great writer, and he makes great contributions here, and I learn a lot from him even though I don’t totally agree with him. And as far as I can see, Mr Foy is a Gentleman.
Same goes for Taki, who disagrees with Mr Foy’s accusations of Kissinger. I also think Taki is largely mistaken about Kissinger’s talents and his role in international affairs. But Taki is a real thinker and a real gentleman, and we can agree to disagree. Taki and Mr Foy and I all disagree about Kissinger - but none of us threaten each other like you have so ridiculously (and impotently) threatened me, Mr Bluestone.
So who the hell is “John F” (the third person in your triumvirate of your list of me “enemies")? And why should anyone care?
Finally, IF it’s true that you and Mr Foy and “John F” are “enemies” of mine because of my neutrality about Kissinger, then what the hell are you doing here on Taki’s Mag, where Taki is a personal friend of Kissinger?
This makes you look like a pathetic bully. (And again, a cowardly one as you don’t use your own name.) If you tell me I have “enemies” because I’m neutral about Kissinger, then why the f--- don’t you have the guts to threaten
TAKI who is a personal FRIEND of Kissinger?
You bloody coward, “Bluestone.”
(And Mr Foy, I am presuming that you have no personal connection with this cowardly bullying asshole who calls himself “Bluestone, and I am sorry that he took your name in vain, Mr Foy. Meanwhile, I know our host Taki will appreciate how I called out “Bluestone” for the cowardly bully that he is. We can and do disagree here in Taki’s internet “Gentleman’s club”,
but we all know our host Taki doesn’t take kindly to cowardly bullies who make anonymous threats while using other real people’s names.......)
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Well, Ball, I knew you would finally panic and make a run for it. But right into Kissinger’s gaping maw? I never envisioned such a splendid ending.
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