Oh Henry!

I have too many children to write a memoir. Every call home for the rest of their lives will begin with “Dad, you have humiliated me forever by telling that story…” I don’t think so!

Once I passed 50, I figured most of my life was in the rearview mirror, giving me some leeway to occasionally look backward instead of forwards. Additionally, at that time I reluctantly relinquished my dream of becoming a professional baseball player and accepted the fate of forever toiling in obscurity.

Now that I hear Henry Kissinger is 11 days from his 100^th birthday, it occurs to me that maybe I signed off on my first-half rights too soon. Here is a man of great renown and achievement, and he is still enlightening us with his wisdom. Or is he?

Perhaps my learned audience can enlighten me. Has this guy ever really accomplished anything of note? Or can I grab a moment to speak ill of this “genius” while he is still not dead?

The whole intellectual world of policy thinkers in the early 1970s was divided between the Kissinger guys and the Brzezinski guys. The former did his Kissing in Harvard while the latter shot the Breeze in Columbia. One was a Jew with a German accent, and the other was a Pole with a Polish accent. The former had more Polish, the latter had more juice. It was understood that the next Republican president would grab Hank by the hair while the next Democrat president would pull the Zbig man off campus.

And so it was. Nixon and Ford chewed on an Oh Henry! bar while Carter was blinded by the polish on Ze big new model.

Now it is half a century later and we look back at the results. Nixon bungled Vietnam while Carter bungled Iran. Nixon did one great move, saving Israel from the Yom Kippur War, and it is pretty clear that he did so against the advice of Kissinger, who was too self-conscious as a Jew to try to help the Jews. The great foreign policy accomplishment of the Carter years was the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt, and Zbig was not a player in that deal. Even Biden in the Senate, being overly aggressive with Menachem Begin, did more than Brzezinski for that agreeable moment and that momentous agreement.

We wish old Henry well. He is a friend-of-a-friend of mine through the genteel offices of the late Herb London. He does us all a great service by allowing us to dust off the delicious word “centenarian,” after regaling us with a delightful decade of “nonagenarian.”

Among Jews (Henry always hates to be reminded of his Hebrew school days and once famously snubbed a childhood friend in the airport while greeting foreign dignitaries) we offer the blessing for long life: “May you live until 120!” That number is the age reached by Moses.

Moses avoided hype and produced results, while Henry has always been adept at the hype.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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