Hello, Dolly!?!

[QCao009@AOL.COM]

Well, Hello, Henry

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

ASHINGTON

The hate-Henry industry within the aging liberal establishment is having a 
hissy fit over President Bush's appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the 
commission inquiring into why our government failed to anticipate Sept. 11, 
and how to avert such disasters in the future.I yield to nobody in presenting 
credentials as a Kissinger critic. 

On my wall is a 1973 drawing by David Levine, the greatest caricaturist since 
James Gillray, showing me gleefully ensconced in the powerful secretary of 
state's hair, bedeviling him mercilessly from my new perch at The New York 
Times. Henry attributes this animus to my belief that he caused the tapping 
of my home phone when we both worked at the White House, exacerbated by my 
outrage at his subsequent acquiescence to the shah of Iran's betrayal of my 
friends, the Kurds. The fact is that I kicked Henry when he was up. 

Here we are, three decades later, and Henry-haters cry: How dare Bush appoint 
this scourge of leakers to a job that requires the exposure of embarrassments 
in the intelligence world? Won't a grateful Kissinger do Bush's bidding by 
protecting the Saudi bankrollers of terror for "reasons of state"? No. The 
Kissinger of today is not the sycophant of the Nixon tapes, the 
realpolitiking Super-K of the Ford era. Nor is he the amateur Machiavelli of 
the 1980 G.O.P. convention at which he tried to broker a Reagan-Ford 
"co-presidency" — a bid to hold on to power that led him into the political 
wilderness, equally unloved by anti-Nixon liberals and anti-détente 
conservatives. 

During his wilderness years, however, with no visible means of official 
support, he maintained a level of influence through an amazing feat of 
self-levitation. By counseling clients for huge fees and tutoring rising 
politicians for no fee, he maintains both his global business status and his 
diplomatic contacts. By writing long (too long, I keep telling him) columns 
in a deliberative setting, and by rationing his thoughtful if lugubrious 
television appearances, he maintains a serious intellectual standing. He is 
neither an extinct volcano nor an erupting one; rather, he oozes a lava of 
foreign-policy judgment. Unlike John Poindexter, he has learned from his 
egregious mistakes and may even differentiate government secrecy from 
personal privacy. 

Approaching octogenarianhood, Kissinger has become a foreign-policy resource, 
capable of reassessing his earlier disdain for Wilsonian idealism. Does that 
qualify him for chief 9/11 inquisitor? If the main object is to find the 
sinners of commission, no; if to discover the sins of omission, probably; if 
to recommend strategic changes in our approach to the war on terror, 
certainly.Conflicts of interest? He's working for his historic reputation 
now, not his clients; same with George Mitchell, his Democratic balancer. I'd 
like to see them joined not only by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, but by wild 
cards like Lee Hamilton and Dan Quayle, Mario Cuomo and Stanley Sporkin, 
shaken up by writers David Wise and Edward Jay Epstein. A popular choice for 
chief counsel would be Rudy Giuliani. 

I recall sitting in Edward Bennett Williams's box at a Redskins game in 
Henry's heyday. Our quarterback threw a touchdown pass, but an official threw 
a flag for offensive interference. "Bad call!" shouted Williams. Former Chief 
Justice Earl Warren, in the next seat, shook his head sadly and said, "Poor 
judgment." Henry leaped to his feet, shook his fists and yelled, "On vot 
theory?" 

What's the rationale for a card-carrying Kissinger critic to be pleased by 
Bush's giving this battered but unbowed national resource the power of 
subpoena to serve his country one last time? Just as F.D.R. appointed Joseph 
P. Kennedy as first chairman of the S.E.C. because that predator knew all the 
manipulative tricks, Bush chose Kissinger because the old operator can see 
through the secret obfuscations he mastered long ago. And because "only 
Nixon" could bring along right-wingers in his opening to Beijing, Henry is 
one of the few who has the trust of the keepers of the secrets to reveal to 
the commission the truth about our weaknesses, past and present. On top of 
that, he's equipped to fit the facts into a "conceptual framework" — his 
beloved cliché — to provide desperately needed guidance to the Homeland 
Security bureaucracy. 

Dot's my theory. 

Welcome back, Henry.    
    
    



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