By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Bill Kilgore reporting from Ho Chi Minh City
War criminal, serial liar, and Nixon confederate Henry Kissinger turned 100 this week (even as vastly better people like Tina Turner died much younger). The press, which has given this dissembling poseur a free ride since 1968, was all in on the celebration.
First, for those of you younger than, um, 50, let's start with a little background on this great son of the Harvard (now Some Finagler) Faculty of Arts and Sciences, courtesy of The Nation:
We'll get a little deeper into the napalm-charred weeds but Anthony Bourdain's assessment remains painfully accurate:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
What was Anthony so mad about? Just this:
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| Henry Kissinger says Good Morning Cambodia |
Kissinger, who’d been appointed national security adviser, advised Nixon to order the bombing of Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to the negotiating table. Nixon and Kissinger were desperate to resume the talks that they had helped sabotage, and their desperation manifested itself in ferocity. “‘Savage’ was a word that was used again and again” in discussing what needed to be done in Southeast Asia, recalled one of Kissinger’s aides. Bombing Cambodia (a country the US wasn’t at war with), which would eventually break the country and lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, was illegal. So it had to be done in secret. The pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration, leading Kissinger and Nixon to ask J. Edgar Hoover to tap the phones of administration officials. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak sent Kissinger into a panic. He was afraid that since Ellsberg had access to the papers, he might also know what Kissinger was doing in Cambodia.
To impress North Vietnam, Kissinger ordered the secret bombing of a country the United States was not at war with. That bombing took the lives of between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodians (with the lack of precision testimony to the scale and brutality of the assault). God knows how many more were crippled or wounded.
Fun fact: North Vietnam was not impressed.
Kissinger's war crimes had been preceded by actual crimes, including treason on behalf of his patron Dick Nixon before the 1968 election:
Still a Harvard professor, .. Kissinger, “on his own,” offered to pass along information he had received from an aide attending the peace talks. . . .At the end of October, Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, “They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” Hours later, President Johnson suspended the bombing. A peace deal might have pushed Hubert Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. Nixon’s people acted quickly; they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks.
Through wiretaps and intercepts, President Johnson learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese “to hold on until after the election.” If the White House had gone public with this information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. “This is treason,” he said....
But we're not mainly interested in Kissinger's litany of war crimes and blunders, including green-lighting barbaric crimes against civilians by the Chilean and Argentine military dictatorships, his insane advocacy of nuclear war in Europe while still locked in a cubicle in Littauer, his pointless prolongation of the Vietnam War for three sanguinary years, or his endless toadying to the increasingly paranoid and unhinged Dick Nixon, including an Oval Office prayer session.
We're interested in Kissinger's decades of success in generating gushing press coverage like this:
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| Kissinger has always enjoyed a favorable press |
As if recoiling from their own sudden doggedness in exposing Nixon’s crimes, reporters and news anchors rallied around Kissinger. While the rest of the White House was revealed as a bunch of two-bit thugs, Kissinger remained someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’ Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” He was, Koppel added, “the best thing we’ve got going for us.”
Koppel's idiotic fawning drivel was the rule. Marvin Kalb, once a well-regarded journalist for CBS News, sold his soul to get Henry's cooperation on a book that would make him a pantload of royalties:
Marvin Kalb was granted the ultimate honor of an exclusive television interview. They give credit where it is due, beginning their page of acknowledgments with this offer of appreciation: “Our thanks go first to Henry A. Kissinger, who, as an historian as well as a statesman, understands the critical importance of primary sourcing. He has been generous with his time and his knowledge.” It can fairly be said that his generosity has been rewarded.
How times have changed! Now that Nixon's criminality and the insane brutal futility of the Vietnam War (and its Cambodian and Laotian spinoffs) have passed into incontrovertible history, Kissinger...still gets a fawning reception from the press on the no doubt auspicious occasion of his 100th birthday.
The Washington Post had the nerve to publish an op-ed by an objective source – Henry's non-war-criminal son David, explaining Henry's secret to a long and healthy life. The correct answer of course was a sociopathic lack of shame or guilt, but instead David told us
His mind is a heat-seeking weapon that identifies and grapples with the existential challenges of the day. In the 1950s, the issue was the rise of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity.
His actual position was that we should use nuclear weapons in Europe to prove how big and strong we are, an idiotic view that he adopted to suck up to Nelson Rockefeller and other Cold Warriors who might be able to advance Henry's career. (And his mind, supposedly attracted by heat, somehow never spent even one minute regretting the bombs that burnt Cambodia towns and children.)
To balance out that piece, the Post published another P.O.S. patronizing those who did not join the birthday celebrations.
But the younger generation — or at least, the left-leaning among them — is indeed letting its own thoughts (and, yes, emotions) be known on the internet. There, making light of Kissinger’s eventual death — and remarkable longevity — has been a popular meme for years.
Really? How popular is it? We waste a lot of time on the Internet, and we've never seen it, although we have spotted many mentions of the people who have been outlived by Liza Minelli, who is not a war criminal.
The piece did make glancing reference to Kissinger's atrocities in Cambodia but dropped the issue upon quoting this breathtakingly arrogant non-response from the Great Prevaricator:
“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old. And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”
We have thought about it, because hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Chileans, and Argentinians aren't alive to think about it for themselves.
We think that in the year 2023 the media's continuing to ignore Kissinger's criminality while treating him as a statesman is almost as dangerous as their continuing to ignore the Republican Party's participation in subversion and insurrection while treating it as a legitimate part of American politics.
In other words, it's an insult to everyone we remember on this Memorial Day and every thing they fought for.
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