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Entry: The Kissinger Pardon Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/kissingers_lettre_de_cachet#2726 Post contents: @ Mr Diachok: "The pedestrian character of how these foreign policy wonks think fascinates me. ...it’s not brilliance but connections that results in high-level appointments." Your first point is bang on; Kissinger's thought is entirely pedestrian; he launched his career as an academic opportunist whose principal talent consisted of "re-presenting" already fashionable ideas, albeit under a superficial veneer of the kind of technocratic "analysis" which Americans tend to mistake for profundity. But that perverse and actually vulgar talent, rather than any pre-existing "connections", is what led to his promotion to high office by Richard Nixon, who in his own way was addicted to the American cult of publicity and therefore mistook Kissinger's veneer of popularly perceived intellectual "gravitas" for substance. Kissinger made (or rather, concocted) his reputation through two ghastly and intellectually dishonest books, "Nuclear Power and Foreign Policy" (1957) and "The Necessity of Choice" (1961), in which he argued that limited nuclear war (including the use of tactical nuclear weapons) was a viable and even necessary potential response to the putative dangers arising from the "missile gap." Sheer stupidity and hubris, and how unlike the moral AND strategic clarity of George Kennan, who wrote: "The readiness to use nuclear weapons against other human beings - against people whom we do not know, whom we have never seen, and for whose guilt or innocence it is not for us to establish - and in doing so, to place in jeopardy the natural structure upon which all civilization rests, as though the safety and the perceived interests of our own generation were more important than everything that has ever taken place or could take place in civilization: this is nothing less than a presumption, a blasphemy, an indignity - an indignity of monstrous dimensions - offered to God!” (From Kennan's "The Nuclear Delusion") It was not Kissinger, but Kennan who was America's real foreign policy genius of "Realpolitik" in the late 20th century. But Kennan was never an academic opportunist or a publicity hound. Sent at: 2008 05 16