Safire on Henry the K. "Set a Thief to catch one!"
December 2, 2002
Well, Hello, Henry
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
[W] ASHINGTON
The hate-Henry industry within the aging liberal establishment is having a hissy fit over President Bush's appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the commission inquiring into why our government failed to anticipate Sept. 11, and how to avert such disasters in the future.
I yield to nobody in presenting credentials as a Kissinger critic. On my wall is a 1973 drawing by David Levine, the greatest caricaturist since James Gillray, showing me gleefully ensconced in the powerful secretary of state's hair, bedeviling him mercilessly from my new perch at The New York Times.
Henry attributes this animus to my belief that he caused the tapping of my home phone when we both worked at the White House, exacerbated by my outrage at his subsequent acquiescence to the shah of Iran's betrayal of my friends, the Kurds. The fact is that I kicked Henry when he was up.
Here we are, three decades later, and Henry-haters cry: How dare Bush appoint this scourge of leakers to a job that requires the exposure of embarrassments in the intelligence world? Won't a grateful Kissinger do Bush's bidding by protecting the Saudi bankrollers of terror for "reasons of state"?
No. The Kissinger of today is not the sycophant of the Nixon tapes, the realpolitiking Super-K of the Ford era. Nor is he the amateur Machiavelli of the 1980 G.O.P. convention at which he tried to broker a Reagan-Ford "co-presidency" ? a bid to hold on to power that led him into the political wilderness, equally unloved by anti-Nixon liberals and anti-détente conservatives.
During his wilderness years, however, with no visible means of official support, he maintained a level of influence through an amazing feat of self-levitation. By counseling clients for huge fees and tutoring rising politicians for no fee, he maintains both his global business status and his diplomatic contacts. By writing long (too long, I keep telling him) columns in a deliberative setting, and by rationing his thoughtful if lugubrious television appearances, he maintains a serious intellectual standing.
He is neither an extinct volcano nor an erupting one; rather, he oozes a lava of foreign-policy judgment. Unlike John Poindexter, he has learned from his egregious mistakes and may even differentiate government secrecy from personal privacy. Approaching octogenarianhood, Kissinger has become a foreign-policy resource, capable of reassessing his earlier disdain for Wilsonian idealism.
Does that qualify him for chief 9/11 inquisitor? If the main object is to find the sinners of commission, no; if to discover the sins of omission, probably; if to recommend strategic changes in our approach to the war on terror, certainly.
Conflicts of interest? He's working for his historic reputation now, not his clients; same with George Mitchell, his Democratic balancer. I'd like to see them joined not only by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, but by wild cards like Lee Hamilton and Dan Quayle, Mario Cuomo and Stanley Sporkin, shaken up by writers David Wise and Edward Jay Epstein. A popular choice for chief counsel would be Rudy Giuliani.
I recall sitting in Edward Bennett Williams's box at a Redskins game in Henry's heyday. Our quarterback threw a touchdown pass, but an official threw a flag for offensive interference. "Bad call!" shouted Williams. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the next seat, shook his head sadly and said, "Poor judgment." Henry leaped to his feet, shook his fists and yelled, "On vot theory?"
What's the rationale for a card-carrying Kissinger critic to be pleased by Bush's giving this battered but unbowed national resource the power of subpoena to serve his country one last time?
Just as F.D.R. appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as first chairman of the S.E.C. because that predator knew all the manipulative tricks, Bush chose Kissinger because the old operator can see through the secret obfuscations he mastered long ago.
And because "only Nixon" could bring along right-wingers in his opening to Beijing, Henry is one of the few who has the trust of the keepers of the secrets to reveal to the commission the truth about our weaknesses, past and present.
On top of that, he's equipped to fit the facts into a "conceptual framework" ? his beloved cliché ? to provide desperately needed guidance to the Homeland Security bureaucracy.
Dot's my theory. Welcome back, Henry. |
