Kissinger kiss-up: Media not doing their job

Winston Churchill once described the pre-war Germans as people “who are either at your throat or at your feet.” That’s also a pretty apt description of the American media, at least when it comes to a certain kind of intellectual celebrity. And when that celeb is Henry Kissinger, most of the U.S. press definitely has bruised elbows and knees.

Objections to the former secretary of State’s appointment to head the official inquiry into whether intelligence failures contributed to the Sept. 11 disasters have been quietly -- even respectfully -- raised on various editorial pages.

The Times, for example, quickly opposed the choice President Bush announced rather cannily on Thanksgiving eve, when half the country was on the road and the other half in the kitchen. This week, the New York Times criticized Kissinger’s refusal to give up his lucrative international consulting business or to reveal the identity of its clients, which are thought to include both Mideastern governments and U.S. corporations doing business with them.

What is conspicuously missing, however, are the analytic profiles and investigative news reports concerning a factual record that is almost perversely dissonant with the responsibilities now laid upon him.

Kissinger, after all, is a man whose entire record of public service is studded with attempts to suppress information about the conduct of government and to deceive the American people and their elected representatives.

Where, for example, are the stories about how, as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, he sought and encouraged the extra-constitutional wiretapping of government employees, journalists and academics?

Where are the accounts of how Kissinger lied to Congress about the secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos, of how he deceived Sen. Frank Church’s committee about U.S. intelligence abuses, including the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected government? (The latter, it is worth recalling, involved acquiescence to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s international terror network, whose kidnappings and assassinations included a car bombing in Washington, D.C.) The answer seems to be that the memory of all this has been laundered from respectable media attention by Kissinger’s carefully cultivated social and professional relationships with taste-making journalists like Ted Koppel, Jim Lehrer and Tina Brown, who recently lionized the ex-diplomat in one of her famously acerbic columns for the Times of London. At least that’s the view of Christopher Hitchens, who within hours of Kissinger’s appointment published a damning outline of his record in a column for the online magazine Slate.

Hitchens, who also is the author of a book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (Verso Books, 2001), which controversially alleges that Kissinger should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, points to the way in which the onetime Nixon aide’s rather thin academic credentials and Mitteleuropean gravity have combined to make him a hyper-respectable uber-professorial presence on programs like ABC’s “Nightline” and PBS’ “News Hour.”

Kissinger’s “biggest coup in life,” said Hitchens, “is getting people like Koppel and Lehrer to treat him like an impartial expert and to call him ‘doctor’ on the air.” (Kissinger has a doctorate and taught at Harvard before his government service.)

“If everyone in America with a degree like his was called ‘doctor,’ it would be like Heidelberg under Bismarck,” said Hitchens. “The fact is he was a mediocre academic with the ability to express his views in a German accent, and if that impressed people in the Oval Office, perhaps it’s no wonder it also works in newsrooms.

“However, when the Ted Koppels of the world bestow their imprimatur on him, it’s not like the approval conferred by one of these rat-bag fruit bats on Fox Television. This seeps through the media culture. And when reputation leads the media simply to accept someone at face value, as it has now done with Kissinger, the elementary work of journalism just doesn’t get done.”

A small but telling taste of Kissinger’s respect for the historical record can be gleaned from a passage in his 1982 memoirs in which he describes a campaign to “sabotage legitimate and considered policies by tendentious leaks of classified information in the middle of a war.... The issue became particularly acute in June 1971 when 7,000 pages of confidential files on Indochina from the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies -- the so-called Pentagon Papers -- were leaked to the press. None of these documents were embarrassing to the Nixon administration. They could have been used to support the proposition that we inherited a mess, and some in the Nixon White House urged that we exploit them in this way....”

It is a typical Kissinger historical passage, omitting a key fact and obscuring another -- both to his benefit. As the verbatim transcript of one of the infamous White House tapes -- WHT-5, to be precise -- shows, Kissinger phoned Nixon from California on June 13, 1971, to discuss, among other things, the New York Times’ publication of material from the Pentagon Papers.

On the tape, the president and his national security advisor agreed that “treason” had been committed by the leaker and that the paper’s publication of the material was “unconscionable.” And though he does not mention it in his memoirs, it was Kissinger who first suggested the legal action that ultimately lead to the U.S. Supreme Court and one of the 20th century’s most consequential victories for the 1st Amendment in the Pentagon Papers case:

Nixon: ... [T]his is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.

Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.

Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? What kind of -- what kind of people would do such things?

Kissinger: [Unclear] It has the most -- it has the highest classification [unclear].

Nixon: Yeah, yeah.

Kissinger: It’s -- it’s treasonable, there’s no question -- it’s actionable, I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.

Nixon: What -- what do we do about it -- don’t we ask for an....

Kissinger: I think I -- I [unclear -- shall? should?] talk to [Atty. Gen. John] Mitchell.

Moreover, as the transcript also shows, Kissinger was foremost among those within the White House pushing for partisan exploitation of the leaked documents:

Kissinger: In public opinion, it actually, if anything will help us a little bit, because this is a goldmine of showing how the previous administration got us in there.

Nixon: I didn’t read the thing -- [unclear] give me your view on that -- in, in a word....

Kissinger: It just shows massive mismanagement of how we got there, and it [unclear] pins it all on Kennedy and Johnson.

None of this material is hard to find. It all has been published or is in the public domain. The lack of reportorial attention to Kissinger’s record can be ascribed to two things: the media’s short attention span and the sort of instincts that make sheep so easy to handle.