Partying with Kissinger

If you haven’t read Chotiner’s devastating interview with Ted Koppel about how the Washington elite loves the mass murderer Kissinger, you must. There are a couple of good pieces about Kissinger’s 100th birthday party. Who the fuck shows up for this in 2023? Too many people.

On Monday evening at the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street entrance, several men were on their knees meticulously installing a red carpet over the stone steps as a half-dozen security guards in suits looked out from behind the velvet rope.

I was there to crash the 100th-birthday party of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of State to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who historians and journalists say is responsible for countless atrocities. He prolonged and expanded the Vietnam War with the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people. He helped empower genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. He enabled juntas that overthrew democracies in Chile and Argentina. He’s often called a war criminal, and the long-running social-media joke is that he’s still alive while so many better humans are dead.

When I heard that there was one happening in Manhattan with a secret guest list and that he would be attending in person, I decided to go as well. I would stake out the scene and document the guests for history’s sake — or at least for what’s left of Twitter.

I knew about it only from a cryptic line on Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s schedule: “7:30 p.m. Secretary Blinken attends a celebration in honor of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in New York City, New York. (CLOSED PRESS COVERAGE).” You can’t really close press coverage when the event is taking place in Bryant Park, though, and I wanted to ask Blinken what he was doing there. It seemed peculiar that Kissinger was such a cherished statesman to a certain smart set yet no one wanted to talk about celebrating him.

…

I write about foreign policy, and this was my first time covering a red carpet. But here I was, not asking, “Who are you wearing?” but instead inquiring as to what about Kissinger merits celebrating. Luckily, years of reporting on foreign affairs had trained me well in recognizing senior citizens in black tie. I introduced myself to David Petraeus (who rushed by, even though we sometimes email — General, please get back to me!) and Larry Summers (who had no interest in chatting).

Then arrived Jane Harman, who once served as the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. What’s Kissinger’s legacy? “Everything, everywhere, all at once,” she said. She posed for me to snap a photo and then got checked in by a guard.

William J. Burns, the CIA director, crossed the sidewalk with a tough-looking entourage. Then came more guests in black Escalades and Audis and a couple of green Bentleys. The security guards kept reminding me to stay away, an instruction I politely ignored, and a crowd of Israeli tourists asked me what was going on. The former New York schools chancellor Joel Klein walked in, and Diane von Furstenberg seemed to have snuck by me.

I mean, this is just disgusting.

More on Blinken and Samantha Power attending this:

That Samantha Power, USAID director and supposed human rights champion, and Tony Blinken, US secretary of state and supposed human rights champion, are unmitigated phonies and sanctimonious hypocrites is not a new revelation. Indeed, I’ve dedicated many articles and podcast episodes to this very topic. But Power and Blinken attending a black-tie event this week celebrating Henry Kissinger, one of the 20th century’s most notorious war criminals, is a new and noteworthy low for the Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex. As Vox’s Jonathan Guyer documented from the red carpet outside the New York Public Library, both US officials showed up at the event to celebrate the life of the former Nixon advisor and Secretary of State:

What is the Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex? The HRCTIC is central to the US civic myth-making machine. It’s the thin moral architecture that justifies maintaining and expanding 800+ overseas military bases, meddling in countless countries’ internal affairs, exerting massively disproportionate control over the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, and sanctioning over 12,000 entities in dozens of countries resulting in the starvation and economic ruin of of millions. The entire hegemonic system by which the US has imposed, and continues to impose, its will upon the rest of the world only works if those operating that system, and the domestic populations and Congress funding it, believe they are doing so for a high-minded purpose. This high-minded purpose, as a matter of course, is said to be the promotion of feel-good buzzwords like “human rights,” “democracy,” and the ill-defined, ever-present “liberal, rules-based order.”  

This system can’t operate, however, without imbuing itself with a vague sense of credibility in the eyes of half-paying-attention liberals, a superficial credibility people like Power have spent two decades cultivating and polishing. A then-war correspondent, Power published her best seller, A Problem from Hell, in 2002. It was a love letter to US interventionism under the banner of “protecting” defenseless victims of genocides (helpless people living in Baddie Countries, mainly). The biggest problem, as Power saw it, was that the US needs a “human rights”-driven foreign policy that uses its considerable military might to stand up for the Little Guy. An ostensibly noble goal, but one that any reasonable observer might view as simply rebranded pretext for continuing the great American tradition of selective imperial meddling. One could see this warped worldview taking hold early in Power’s career when she gave equivocal, tortured—sometimes affirming—responses when asked about the then-pending US invasion of Iraq. Power joined the Obama campaign as an adviser in 2007, then the National Security Council, and later became the US ambassador to the United Nations, where she promoted the NATO bombing of Libya and backed Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen that, at the time, had killed over 250,000, all of which she whitewashed in her self-serving memoir published in 2019. 

You can say this latter piece is a bit on the unhinged side itself, but it has every right to be. The supposed liberal champions of human rights are celebrating the greatest violator of international human rights in modern American history! How is this even remotely acceptable? But of course it has been ever since Kissinger was hanging out at Studio 54 with Barbara Walters and other celebrities in the 70s.

And I want to be clear here–no matter what you think about Hillary Clinton, the way she fawned over Kissinger for years and years is something you must repudiate. That’s even more true if you are a fan of Hillary. I mean, there’s just no arguing for it. It is absolutely indicative of the corruption of the DC elite on foreign policy issues and excusing Hillary befriending him just reinforces the whole gross system. Why did Hillary say that Kissinger was her friend? Either it was a cynical move to make her seem acceptable to the foreign policy elites (which she very much did not need since she had already proven an effective Secretary of State) or she actually does consider this monster to be her friend. As Chotiner says to Koppel in their exchange:

Let me just ask you one last question, on a personal level. Reading about things like Kissinger’s support for the Pakistani military during genocide in Bangladesh, reading about him telling torturers in Argentina to hurry up their work—I don’t know, it would just be hard for me to be friends with him. Is that something you talk about with him personally, or do you just feel differently than I do?

No, I think that’s a fair point to make, Isaac, and let me think about that a little bit more. I’ve been covering the man for fifty years, and I find him a particularly interesting diplomat, statesman, a man who has shaped the foreign policy of this country in ways many of which I think are positive. I don’t think either one of us has a purely one-dimensional view of Henry Kissinger. I certainly don’t. But you seem to be more fixated on the . . . [long pause] negative. Seems like too weak a term, doesn’t it?

WHY WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH HENRY KISSINGER!