Another Reason to Hate Henry Kissinger

It's not often you get to see the Establishment live on television. But there it was during the televised funeral of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Case, Lawrence Eagleburger, Herbert Allen, Oscar de la Renta, Barbara Walters, Vernon Jordan, Barry Diller, Robert McNamara, Dick and Lynn Cheney, Rudy Giuliani (seemingly sans wife or girlfriend) were all present to bid farewell at the National Cathedral, as former Senator John Danforth delivered the homily and Yo-Yo Ma played.

Graham certainly deserved a fine send-off. After the suicide of her bipolar husband in 1963, she transformed herself from a high-society housewife into a formidable media baron, while transforming the Post from a so-so newspaper into one of mainstream journalism's most prominent sheets. And during the Watergate scandal -- as we all know -- she backed two greenhorn reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as they produced front-page stories that helped topple a crooked president.

My beef isn't with her. It's with the Establishment-as-one-happy-family message conveyed at her farewell. Not that this was a fake and insincere message. The problem is it was all too genuine.

The first eulogist for Graham was Henry Kissinger. When he took his place before the power-congregants, the crowd should have either gagged in disgust or guffawed at the absurdity, for Kissinger represents the antithesis of the values for which Graham was so celebrated after her death. Throughout the media coverage of her death, Graham was lionized as an advocate of truth-seeking, no-holds-bar journalism, a media owner who recognized the press's obligation to scrutinize the powerful and hold them accountable in order to strengthen the republic. Kissinger was the opposite: a practitioner of secret government, a public official who believed that he need not inform the citizenry of his actions -- even when (that is, especially when) they resulted in the deaths of thousands -- and that he need not be held accountable by the people he supposedly served.

Kissinger's offenses could fill a book -- and have done so at least twice (Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power and, more recently Christopher Hitchens' The Trial of Henry Kissinger). Here is an abbreviated indictment. As national security adviser to President Nixon, he misled the public repeatedly about the Vietnam War and sustained a doomed-to-failure effort that led to the pointless deaths of many Americans and Vietnamese. He orchestrated the secret (and arguably illegal) bombing of Cambodia. He participated in the wiretapping of his own staffers in the White House, and he ordered the bugging of a New York Times reporter. He plotted with Nixon and the CIA to overthrow the democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende and engineered the destabilization of Chile, which led to a bloody military coup and the installation of a totalitarian, murderous regime. He suggested to Nixon that White House operatives conduct break-ins against political foes. He was aware of and somewhat involved in the creation of the White House "plumbers" unit, the band of covert agents who pulled off (and bungled) the Watergate caper.

These days, Kissinger is, in a way, a wanted man. Judges and investigators in France, Chile, Italy and Argentina want to question him about US knowledge or encouragement of human rights abuses and political assassinations mounted in the 1970s by Chile's military regime. Of course, he has not offered to be of assistance.

Kissinger acknowledged at the Graham funeral that he and Kay had their policy and political differences. (After all, in 1971 her newspaper, following the lead of The New York Times, published the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War -- an act that drove Kissinger and Nixon up the wall.) But the continuation of their close friendship, despite such differences, Kissinger noted, was in keeping with "the permanent Washington that transmutes the partisanship of the moment into national purpose and lasting value." Kissinger added, "The Kay of the permanent establishment never lost sight of the fact that societies thrive not by the victories of their factions, but by their ultimate reconciliations."