Kissinger was a bastard and I didn’t need to read more about him to know that. Hitchens and Anthony Bourdain where convincing enough.
Still, all the obits, the Rolling Stone nailed it, pointed to The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Seymour M. Hersh, so I gave it a go. It is hefty and Hersh has the goods. The footnotes are a goldmine of tangents worth exploring. Read and be amazed about the collective neurosis of a group of insecure men in power.
Striking is that the paranoia, the lying and the wiretapping was there from the start of the presidency and not solely triggered by the Pentagon Papers, that only turbocharged it. It was also directed inward, silo’s within the bureaucracy, wiretaps of near staffmembers, the lying to one another and themselves. Kissinger was right up there with the worst of them.
There is some highly familiar stuff that we see later in administrations: having the CIA rewrite intelligence reports to fit the policy goals (Multihead warheads in Russia), NSA not telling what is going on, because the Whitehouse has already made his conclusion (is North Korea the aggressor?), putting the thumb on the scales in foreign elections (Nixon: honest elections sure, so long as our side wins, Vietnam).
This book is from 1983! Anyone who spoke with Kissinger after that point (or sooner) and thought this man was worth listening to, is beyond me. Hillary is a an easy target, but the list is looong.
A word on the author: Hersh is a legend. His uncovering of My Lai alone is enough. This book, Watergate etc is simply great and backed up with the work of others. His recent work … I don’t know, but it shouldn’t diminish his earlier work.
by pointmaisterflex