WASHINGTON — It's an inspired choice. Bold, counterintuitive, edgy, outside
the box.
Who better to investigate an unwarranted attack on America than the man who
used to instigate America's unwarranted attacks?
Who better to ferret out government duplicity and manipulation than the man
who engineered secret wars, secret bombings, secret wiretaps and secret coups,
and still ended up as a Pillar of the Establishment and Nobel Peace Prize winner?
It was Dick Cheney's brainstorm, naturally. Only someone as pathologically
opaque as the vice president could appreciate the sublime translucency of Henry
Kissinger. And only someone intent on recreating the glory days of the Ford and
Nixon White Houses could have hungered to add the 79-year-old Dr. Strange—— I
mean, Dr. Kissinger to the Bush team.
There will be naysayers who quibble that the president's choice to lead the
9/11 commission is not so much a realist as an opportunist, not so much Metternich
as Machiavelli.
They will look askance at Mr. Kissinger's résumé: keeping the Vietnam War
going for years after he realized it might be unwinnable; encouraging the illegal
bombing of Cambodia; backing Chile's murderous Pinochet; playing Iago to President
Richard Nixon, telling him he'd be "a weakling" if he did not prosecute newspapers
running the Pentagon Papers; wiretapping journalists and his own colleagues to
track down leaks on the Cambodia bombing.
If you look for the words "Kissinger" and "secret" in the same sentence in
Nexis, the search cannot be completed; there are too many results. When he was
dating Jill St. John and Liv Ullmann and preaching that power is an aphrodisiac,
he even coyly called himself "a secret swinger."
In Walter Isaacson's biography, "Kissinger," the same words cascade: "deceitful,"
"disingenuous," "paranoid," "insecure," "temper tantrum," "flatterer," "two-faced"
and "secretive." The über-diplomat has even been criticized for dissembling in
his own memoirs. But secretiveness is not a disqualification for jobs in this
White House. Quite the contrary: only the clandestine and the conspiratorial need
apply.
Mr. Bush, after all, worked very hard to suppress any investigation of 9/11.
He had to cave to the victims' families, who were hellbent to hear what the president
learned in his August 2001 briefing about Al Qaeda plans, and what wires were
crossed at the C.I.A., F.B.I. and I.N.S.
Now Mr. Bush can let the commission proceed, secure in the knowledge that
Mr. Kissinger has never shed light on a single dark corner, or failed to flatter
a boss, in his entire celebrated career. (He was one of Mr. Bush's patient tutors
in foreign policy during the campaign.)
If you want to get to the bottom of something, you don't appoint Henry Kissinger.
If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of something, you appoint
Henry Kissinger.
Mr. Bush learned about the diplomat's black belt in the black arts long ago,
when he made a patsy of Bush père. As the ambassador to the U.N. in 1971, Bush
41 was accused of aggressively making the case for Taiwan and against Beijing,
even as Mr. Kissinger, the national security adviser, was secretly traveling to
Beijing and undercutting Taiwan.
Afterward, Mr. Kissinger told George H. W. Bush he was "disappointed" that
Beijing had gotten Taiwan's seat in the U.N. "Given the fact that we were saying
one thing in New York and doing another in Washington," Mr. Bush drily observed,
"that outcome was inevitable."
Fortunately, Bush Jr. was not held back by the revulsion that many in his
generation have for Mr. Kissinger's power-drunk promotion of bloody American adventures
abroad. As the former fraternity president told GQ magazine, he stayed a retro
50's guy through the roiling 60's: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining
my time at Yale."
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are in tune with Mr. Kissinger's principles: that
the greatest enemy of U.S. policy is the U.S. media, that American diplomacy may
be happily indifferent to American public opinion, that the great unwashed masses
of our democracy are just a big old drag on the elites who know what's best, and
that corporate pals are a help, not a hindrance, in government work.
For this administration, outside the box is inside the box.
Copyright The New York Times Company
###
