Kissinger and Nixon

Kissinger’s article shows exactly why I am glad he is not in power anymore.

Apparently the underlying basis of his thought in this article is found in one quote: “Ideally, national security concerns should be in harmony with traditional American values, but this ideal cannot always prevail.”

This sounds like a reasonable assumption to make in the real world, and accepted as such, it lends the entire article a cloak of reasonableness.

But I think that the key to this line of thinking lies in the intentions of the person arguing it. I believe that Kissinger prefers authoritarian government and that while he was in government he worked actively to propagate it internationally. The tide of advancing authoritarianism in Latin America in the 1970s (which has now been reversed in the ‘80s) was perhaps not a coincidence or an accident. I believe it was neither.

If defense against socialism or Soviet influence requires befriending or even setting up authoritarian regimes, then why may we not assume, as a logical extension of that line of thinking, that if Kissinger were around during the 1930s, when socialism was making advances in the United States, he would have tried to set up a military government here as a solution?

DAVID M. COLBURN

Los Angeles