Taking Sides: Nixon vs Kissinger

'Both Nixon and Kissinger were loners, shy and introverted, who liked to think of themselves as cool and masterful strategic thinkers'

If only ILX had been around for them then.

I kind of prefer Nixon, for being raised in a hut or whatever, and what Maxine said.

Actually, I worded the above wrong; I'd shoot Nixon as he was the boss, not the functionary. Therefore, i want to shoot all those who grind organs, which I think is a right and proper thing to do.

Anyway, it's Acting MD...

The Republican National Committee announced today that the Republican Party
is changing its emblem from an elephant to a condom. The Committee chairman
explained that the condom more clearly reflects the party's stance today, because a condom accepts inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually getting screwed.

TSA Agents Conduct ‘Full Monty’ Pat-Down On Henry Kissinger

Sure, schadenfreude alert ha ha, but why is this dottering old war criminal still alive?

unsure it was worth the risk of sending several men to the hospital for corneal damage

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/the-statesman/309283/?single_page=true

the atlantic

Ethiopians should have been so lucky as to have had a Pinochet.

really makes ya think

still can't believe a human being actually wrote that sentence

Boy, that is awful. Completely unrevised propaganda claptrap. "People forget" a bunch of tendentious crap that was never true in the first place, and as a result they underrate the achievements of the great Henry Kissinger in keeping America safe from the ruthless North Vietnamese, in a war motivated transparently by a heroic desire to secure peace and prosperity for the globe. The real "tragedy" in the whole situation apparently is that the poor little Henry Kissinger was lonely and needed friends.

The erasure of historical facts to make this article viable is staggering. The war had to be continued for all the same reasons we've always heard, nevermind the 1968 talks. The bombing of Cambodia wasn't really secret, so what's the big deal? The bombing got the North Vietnamese to surrender, and hey, the death tolls have been greatly exaggerated! South Vietnam fell because of the Democrats in Congress!

Just got to the Chile section. OMFG.

wait are u being sarcastic i can't tell.

I am dead serious about thinking this article is grotesque trash riddled with pathetic shopworn apologia for war crimes.

ok good. it's just your phrasing made me wonder if you were paraphrasing the article or if you thought the vietnam war was justified or something

oh, jesus, no!

To be uncomfortable with Kissinger is, as Palmerston might say, only natural. But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion. Kissinger has, in fact, been quite moral—provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated.

what a deeply fucked up paragraph

"of course"

and having read a bit about Castlereagh in the last couple weeks: fuck you.

Some prominent American protesters even visited North Vietnam to publicly express solidarity with the enemy. The Communists, in turn, seduced foreign supporters with soothing assurances of Hanoi’s willingness to compromise. When Charles de Gaulle was negotiating a withdrawal of French troops from Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s (as Kissinger records in Ending the Vietnam War), the Algerians knew that if they did not strike a deal with him, his replacement would certainly be more hard-line. But the North Vietnamese probably figured the opposite—that because of the rise of McGovernism in the Democratic Party, Nixon and Kissinger were all that stood in the way of American surrender. Thus, Nixon and Kissinger’s negotiating position was infinitely more difficult than de Gaulle’s had been.

Kissinger found himself caught between liberals who essentially wanted to capitulate rather than negotiate, and conservatives ambivalent about the war who believed that serious negotiations with China and the Soviet Union were tantamount to selling out. Both positions were fantasies that only those out of power could indulge.

these paragraphs are appearing in a Serious American Periodical.

no they're not, they're appearing in the atlantic.

the atlantic

― brony james (k3vin k.), Saturday, April 27, 2013 9:47 PM (1 hour ago)

xp lol

I can understand witnessing this kind of bootlicking in The Corner. And this is the man who wrote Balkan Ghosts.

liberals who essentially wanted to capitulate rather than negotiate

Shit on this know-nothing shithead.

Nixon deliberately and coolly sabotaged the Paris negotiations in 1968 by (treasonously by most definitions of the word) entering into private correspondence with the North Vietnamese. It was only when it was plain that Paris negotiations were dead in the water, the South Vietnamese government was corrupt to its eyebrows, and the war was unwinnable no matter how many troops we poured in or how many civilians we murdered, that "liberals" started saying we should just cut our losses, stop killing Vietnamese for no discernable reason and leave them to sort out their own fate.

Which still seems to me to be a better policy from 1970 onward than what Nixon and Kissinger cooked up for us.

As for the thread question, Kissinger would have had no power to do evil if Nixon had not empowered him. Nixon held the reins. Kissinger just pulled the plow.

reminds me of the Gore Vidal quote: Nixon was the burglar and Henry the jimmy Or: Nixon was the brains, Kissinger the kooks.

'Both Nixon and Kissinger were loners, shy and introverted, who liked to think of themselves as cool and masterful strategic thinkers'

If only ILX had been around for them then.

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, February 25, 2004 10:50 AM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

nixon seems like more of a /b/ guy to me

yeah def.

EDIT: ah gee guys, thanks for the reddit gold! Mcgovern has been delivered into my hands thanks to upvoters like yourselves :-) - r.m.n.

President Nixon: What's your evaluation of Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he's a--actually I think he's a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains

Kissinger: Well, his brains, are negligible. I--

President Nixon: He's really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He's shallow. He's got no...he's an actor. He--When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, "Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can't you find a few good lines?" [Chuckles.] That's really an actor's approach to foreign policy--to substantive....

President Nixon: I've said a lot of good things, too, you know damn well.

Kissinger: Well, that too.

Later in the 24-minute-long discussion, the two discussed the possibility of Reagan running for president:

President Nixon: Can you think though, Henry, can you think, though, that Reagan with certain forces running in the direction could be sitting right here?

Kissinger: Inconceivable.

So much for Kissinger's powers of prognostication. As they were finishing up--after discussing other matters--Nixon slammed Reagan again:

President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He's got to know that on defense--doesn't he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we've been at--

Kissinger: And I told him--he said, "Why don't you fire the bureaucracy?" I said, "Because there are only so many battles we can fight. We take on the bureaucracy now, they're going to leak us to death. Name me one thing that we have done that the bureaucracy made us do."

President Nixon: The bureaucracy has had nothing to do with anything.

Kissinger: No, no. They've made our lives harder. They've driven us crazy. But that doesn't affect him.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2007/11/nixon-tape-reagan-was-shallow-and-limited-mental-capacity

I thought you were going to post the My Lai news.

President Nixon: I've said a lot of good things, too, you know damn well.

Kissinger: Well, that too.

You've got a partner for Don Henley.

DON: As musicians, as liberals, we felt, you know, a certain obligation to hate Nixon. For the war and things. But even if you acknowledge the liberal social legislation he signed into law, there's something about his silent majority that speaks to all of us.

GLENN: Don and I were a couple of tricky dicks in Topanga Canyon too.

KISSINGER: Well, that too.

To paraphrase Kael on The Last Picture Show, the Eagles (politics and lifestyle aside) were probably a rock band Nixon would have liked.

A+ Don impression there Alfred.

At least three Evil Empires converge

https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/455368968883015680/photo/1

http://espn.go.com/new-york/columns/mlb/story/_/id/10766849/yankees-fan-henry-kissinger-red-sox-fan-samantha-power-talk-baseball-diplomacy

Conrad Black, reviewing a new edition of Elizabeth Drew's Nixon book:

Elizabeth Drew is just as rabidly hostile to her subject now as she was 40 years ago when Nixon resigned. The intervening years have not conferred upon her any sense of proportion or even forgiveness. One of America’s most talented and successful presidents was evil, deranged, contemptible, and inaccessible even to any human feeling. I doubt that this attitude is representative of Drew’s general personality, though I am prepared to accept that she is probably no barrel of laughs or paragon of graciousness. I will take only the slightest liberty compared with the massive exercises in patronizing analyses that Nixon’s critics have never ceased to proclaim about him since he was first a congressman 65 years ago, and write that she, like the rest of the Watergate mythmakers, is concerned that the whole monstrous fraud is crumbling. There was no adequate reason to threaten Nixon’s ability to finish his term, but Nixon — having bungled the investigation and tolerated and even encouraged a rather sleazy and somewhat neurotic ambiance in the White House — had squandered his political capital and declined to put the country through an impeachment trial in the Senate, thinking of the national interest, as he had when he declined Eisenhower’s encouragement judicially to challenge the 1960 election, which was probably stolen by the Kennedys.

as a barrel of laughs AND paragon of graciousness, i say get fucked Conrad Black.

a rather sleazy and neurotic ambiance in the White House

won't somebody think of the poor nixons, doing it all for the nation and getting so little in return

People who think that "there was no adequate reason to threaten Nixon’s ability to finish his term" either have no information about the laws Nixon broke (e.g. putting a hit out on Jack Anderson) or else they believe that all heads of state should be allowed to commit any crime with perfect impunity, like so many Stalins.

Former media baron Conrad Black, who served a sentence in the US for fraud

this guy was woth quoting, huh Sotosyn

hey who better to serve as an expert on fellow obstructors-of-justice

Black's FDR bio is actually rather good.

The Nixon bio is swill and slovenly edited and I couldn't finished it.

Wanted to find a good Nixon bio at my local lol library the other day; Black's would appear to be the only one on the shelf :(

Surprised they don't shelve the Stephen Ambrose three-part one--that would be my recommendation.

Should've known that Alfred had already done a Nixon "well yeah" joke six months before I trotted mine out.

Black's is horrible.

Read Nixonland, The Arrogance of Power, or Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes

I enjoyed Arrogance of Power by Summers a lot

Read the memoirs, ghost-written by Diane Sawyer. Of course you're not going to get an unbiased account, but the level of detail that goes into describing things like Nixon's hotel-thick curtains he used in his White House bedroom to make his personal fortification more like Graceland is really something.

do you mean R.N.? That thing is a brick.

I know! No wolves blowing that one down.

It's so strange that for someone who was such a cover-up, hide the bodies, fuckit I'm going to run away from the secret service and take my own damn road trip with Bebe - I've probably read more first-person dialogue from him than any other president.

It's like in Zodiac, when Graysmith says of Arthur Lee Allen, "They like to help, you know, sometimes."

Nixon's compulsive need to spy on himself is straight out of a PKD novel

R.N. basically stuff like this for 1,100 pages. Not for all audiences.

http://i.imgur.com/n00d6gE.png

it's out of print and prob not in most libraries but jonathan schell's 'the time of illusion' is the best book i've read on nixon and probably the most penetrating analysis i've read of any presidential administration. not one of the 'fun' nixon books -- i.e., no quotes from the tapes -- but just a very straightforward, witty, sad account of what nixon's first term looked like to those who had to live through it. a lot of these books compartmentalize stuff (the jfk bio i just read had alternating chapters for foreign and domestic policy), which is understandable, but nixon's trip to china looks very different if you keep in mind he was still waging full-blown war in vietnam in the name of fighting world communism etc etc, with no acknowledgment that one might be related to the other. that kind of thing happens over and over with nixon: the president who fetishizes "law and order" is also the president who orders break-ins and espionage, and the candidate who sees it as his historic mission to unite the country at any cost is also the guy who comes up with the most divisive electoral strategy in american history. he didn't think he was being disingenuous when he said he wasn't a crook; he really thought he wasn't.

I read The Time of Illusion and yours and clemenza's recommendation. I'm grateful.

in hysterics @ the Blue Heart, for those who are true blue. the psychotic bathos of it. i bought that book at a goodwill a few years ago; should really smoke some hash and dive in. "This will be our secret," I said.

I mean, everything had to be a god damm secret, didn't it?

And yeah, I got my copy at the library's used book sale for three dollars.

dlh otm this book sounds like absolute psychocandy for me

It's all there - the secret trip to the Lincoln Memorial, pulling Kissinger down with him to kneel in prayer, a frothing-at-the-mouth JFK in the Oval Office with him and LBJ, madder than shit about Cuba...

I guess I've used up all my preview options on Google books for the day, but just these excerpts alone for my search of "Dallas" should give you an idea:

http://i.imgur.com/jHAyhq8.png

Didn't know about this book's existence until someone posted about it on Facebook today:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41iIZ-n57uL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Just love the cover photo--not able to find it online as a standalone, unfortunately.

photo of the year to beat

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8j9vZ0IQAA0WKU.jpg:large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX95CJaWsAAFZTV.png

Happy Dick Day!

http://edchnm.gmu.edu/teachinghiddenhistory/sites/default/files/thh/489/nixon-beach.jpg

@andrewtilghman
Today: SECDEF Ash Carter hosts an award ceremony honoring Dr. Henry Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service, 4 pm

‏@OKnox Olivier Knox
Wait wait wait ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BREAKING THE NEWS OF THE SECRET BOMBING OF CAMBODIA?!?!?

hang on to that moral high ground

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/clinton-republican-elder-statesmen-kissinger-226680

Although an endorsement or HRC's courting of the establishment wouldn't surprise me, look at the story again: classic POLITICO use of anonymous/"unnamed" sources.

Anthony Bourdain takes an unusually explicit political position:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cp6jvqtWcAAv6Il.jpg:large

Beating Kissinger to death with your bare hands would no doubt injure them. Much better to use a baseball bat or some other blunt force object.

I think they brought out the worst in each other, a very damaging relationship (for the whole world). Feel like had Nixon had a more idealistic adviser the US would have pulled out of Vietnam quicker and certainly not bombed Cambodia. That said, I doubt Nixon would have listened to someone any less of a hardcore Cold Warrior and realpolitik apologist.

‏@jeremyscahill
Exclusive livestream outside the Trump Kissinger meeting:

https://twitter.com/jeremyscahill/status/799321594397081600

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon Nov 14
Bolton would kill us all. None of this "give him a chance" business. He would. I've said it for years because he would.

He's at the age where he can't hear the ghosts of Cambodian children clawing at his windows. https://t.co/ZrsOye9249

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) May 29, 2019

FB reminded me that this was 50 years ago today (so the actual resignation speech was yesterday):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NogWhoE418k

The resignation was the very first news event I remember happening, with the presumed exception of the Patty Hearst kidnapping. I wish I could return to my six-year-old ignorance of US politics.

I think my first would be my mom mentioning RFK's assassination (I was six); second probably the FLQ Crisis in Canada in 1970.