Kissinger’s brain-UPDATED

Henry Kissinger, in today’s Washington Post, finally, sort of, apologizes for saying that if the Soviets had started gassing Jews it would not have been anyone’s business:

References to gas chambers have no place in political discourse, and I am sorry I made that remark 37 years ago.

Jim Besser at the New York Jewish Week, wonders if Kissinger truly gets it. The point is not that Kissinger and Nixon saw a bigger picture that included, among its many other elements, the interests both of Israel and the Soviet Jews:

The point was that Kissinger, a Jew whose family fled the Nazis, apparently felt perfectly comfortable sitting in the Oval Office day after day, listening to a flaming anti-Semite, apparently not responding to Nixon’s over-the-top bigotry, and sometimes using language (“gassing” the Jews) that must have warmed the cockles of his boss’s hating heart.

What I’d like to know: in any of the countless hours of Nixon White House tapes, which are replete with the disgraced president’s bigoted outbursts, does Kissinger protest Nixon’s anti-Semitism? Does he ever stand up to his boss “Don’t say that, it’s offensive?”

There were times when Kissinger stood up to Jew-baiting. They were not flattering to Kissinger, however — and why explains a lot about his relationship with Nixon, and with his own Jewish identity.

Almost a decade ago, I was among the reporters the AP would send over to College Park, Md. every six months to review the stacks and stacks of Nixon-era transcripts and documents, when the National Archives would release new Nixon materials on the 30th anniversary of their filing (per U.S. law).

The stuff was fascinating, and voluminous. Puling stories out of it was really a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey exercise — grab this stack over here, and there was bound to be something of interest.

Through dint of coincidence, or fate, or maybe because Jew-obsession really did permeate the times and the presidency, I came across two fascinating examples of Kissinger "pushing back" against insensitivity toward the Jews — but not against Nixon.

One, I noted in my story about the latest revelation — Kissinger pushed back against Secretary of State William Rogers in 1972 after the Munich Olympics massacre in September. Kissinger suggested lowering flags to half-mast; Rogers said it would be inappropriate, because none of the dead were American; Nixon took Kissinger’s advice (or said he would — I don’t know for sure that flags were ordered at half-mast.

Kissinger proposes lowering the flags for domestic policy reasons: It would matter to Jewish voters. That’s an argument that wins Nixon over — the president notes that he had made a commensurate symbolic gesture after the British army’s massacre of Northern Ireland demonstrators on "Bloody Sunday" in January, and that having delivered the sop to Irish American voters, he could hardly diss the Jews.

Another was in an account of Kissinger’s secret visit to China in July 1971 to lay the groundwork for Nixon’s historic visit in February. 

Kissinger and Zhou Enlai — effectively, Mao’s prime minister — are chatting about empires and policy over dinner. Zhou broaches the subject of Hitler: Wasn’t he a genius? 

No, Kissinger dissents.

I forget the details, but Zhou outlines Hitler’s triumphs early in the war — and before the war — as templates for successful imperial policy. 

Kissinger adamantly disagrees — one can sense even from the minutes of the meeting that he is growing increasingly discomfited by the talk — but only by noting Hitler’s disastrous errors.

I don’t know whether Zhou was toying with Kissinger because he was a sadist, or whether he was simply fascinated with the phenomenon of a victim of Hitler understanding the world only in utilitarian terms — or both.

But both incidents reveal something significant — small, perhaps, but significant — I think, about Kissinger’s psychology.

It’s not just a matter of suppressing emotion or anger: It is a suppression of self — of his broader, Jewish self in this case. It’s as if his self can’t matter — if he allows it to matter, the results would somehow be catastrophic. 

To lower the flags because Jews were killed in their prime — and in Germany — that, in this mindset, was unconscionable. To say Hitler was a monster, and not just a bad planner — was unthinkable.

Nixon, as nuts as he was about the Jews, emerges from the history — and I realize this is heresy — as more sympathetic than Kissinger.

It was bipolar. When Nixon hated the Jews, he was his vicious worst, but when he liked the Jews, it was because at that moment, he genuinely liked — or even loved — the Jews as a people, or at least his Jewish interlocutor of the moment. Read Nixon’s writings about Golda Meir. God help me, he was almost in love with her. And then, if you read the contemporary documents, you see his decision to airlift arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War (against Kissinger’s objections!) was one of principle more than it was of strategy.

Kissinger, on the other hand, is one-note. The Jews can’t matter. They can’t ever matter, or otherwise — I’m intuiting here, yes — they will matter far, far too much, they will matter to the point of insanity.

Nixon emerges as more sympathetic. But as much as Kissinger’s remarks deserve the opprobrium they have earned, perhaps his inability to embrace his Jewish self, insofar as it is a product of a time, and of an unconscionable, unthinkable childhood — deserves a little sympathy too.

UPDATE: At the New York Jewish Week, Menachem Rosensaft, who has led the calls for Kissinger’s apology, has a much-qualified welcome for the apology:

Kissinger, after all, never publicly expressed any qualms for his acquiescence in the massacres in East Timor, or his covert role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Perhaps we can all be at least a little grateful for small favors.

Rosensaft also breaks down why — as many former Soviet Jewry activists have pointed out to me — Kissinger’s arguments on how Jackson-Vanik influenced emigration have issues with the facts:

As Richard Schifter, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Reagan administration, pointed out in the Forward, “Kissinger’s analysis is not reflected in the actual emigration data. He was close on the 1970 emigration figure, which was 1,027. His quiet diplomacy during detente did increase that number to an annual average of 20,516 from 1971 to 1974. But after Jackson-Vanik’s passage in 1974, the average for 1975 to 1978 dropped only slightly to 18,271 annually. Then, in 1979, the number of emigrants jumped to 51,320, much more than anything achieved under the Nixon-Kissinger policy.” According to Schifter, it was only after the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing “serious deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations” that Soviet Jewish emigration figures “dropped sharply, reaching a low of 876 in 1984.”