Fareed Zakaria's Whitewashing of Kissinger
The Fareed Zakaria GPS eulogy of Kissinger was what can only be properly construed as an embarrassingly bad case of journalism
There is no way around it, Fareed Zakaria whitewashed Kissinger’s legacy this weekend on GPS. Zakaria is both a card-carrying member of The Establishment (“Davos is back with a bang”) as well as a journalist and commentator in good standing. Viewers tuning in to his weekly analysis of global news expected more than mere hagiography this weekend in the case of the death of Henry Kissinger. They wanted to hear the full story, warts and all and not just the tribal lore of the American Cold War foreign policy Establishment.
Zakaria owed more to his audience on the passing of Henry Kissinger, a war criminal though influential American statesman, than was presented. Out of the roughly 6,000 words spoken on Sunday’s episode of GPS, Zakaria devoted about 1800 to Kissinger. The subject of Kissinger’s life bookended the show with opening and closing segments. Kissinger’s megadeaths in southeast Asia and Latin America, possibly numbering in the millions, were briefly mentioned by Zakaria, then brushed aside altogether by the deceased’s enthusiastic biographer, Niall Ferguson.
Zakaria opened with his almost completely laudatory “take” on Kissinger's legacy, then closed the show out with an interview with Niall Ferguson, the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State’s authorized biographer. When asked about the critical reception Kissinger’s death received on social media, Ferguson responded, with the sangfroid of a Bond villain, “Well, my reaction to much of it is revulsion, frankly, an illness, the bottom is a good rule, but it hasn't held back the haters.” This is another way of saying, in fine — haters gonna hate.
If Zakaria’s intention was to give the observer the most glowing review imaginable of a life that oversaw the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of brown-skinned people, then he was quite successful. But it was embarrassingly bad journalism in practice. One side was argued with brio and the other was presented half-heartedly. And so, the premiere foreign policy program in the United States — Zakaria’s GPS — had a friend and lunchtime companion as well as the authorized biographer of a war criminal eulogizing one of the most controversial members of the American Establishment during the Cold War. It was not a great moment in CNN broadcasting history.
David Milne, in The Nation — admittedly not a pro-Kissinger publication — reviewed Ferguson’s 1923-1969: The Idealist, thusly:
Kissinger was consistently reckless, and Ferguson is blind to the pattern. Throughout his career, Kissinger was quick to detect potential humiliations for America—in withdrawing from Vietnam too quickly; in the coming to power of Salvador Allende in Chile; in allowing a dependable friend, Yahya Khan’s Pakistan, to lose a fight with India, led by the unreliable Indira Gandhi—and quick to recommend the deployment of US military resources (whether ground troops, bombing campaigns, covert destabilization programs, or military aid), all in the interests of US “credibility.” The responses he counseled as Nixon’s national-security adviser helped to create catastrophes in each of the regions they affected: the destabilization of Cambodia and the rise of Pol Pot; the ousting of the democratically elected Allende government and the rise of the murderous Augusto Pinochet; a brutal war on the subcontinent during which Pakistan slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in what historian Gary Bass has described, in The Blood Telegram, as “a forgotten genocide.” Kissinger’s brutal policy advice did not stem from realism in any meaningful way, and it certainly wasn’t inspired by the idealism of Immanuel Kant. It was about demonstrating American power to the world, absent a moral core and a sense of proportion.
Ferguson, who had privileged access to Kissinger’s papers, uses the first installment of the biography as a project to inject idealism into the life of the well-known Teutonic-American skeptic. Already this is suspect. One wonders if as a condition to get authorized access to the papers, Ferguson was persuaded to add a little lightness into the increasingly dark proceedings as young Henry the K wades deeper and deeper into the forests of Vietnam in the thick of the Cold War. We will never know now, of course, as Kissinger is now in the process of a pure, organic decomposition process that neither Harvard not the State Department couldn’t prepare him for. Still, no one has ever confused Henry Kissinger with transcendental idealism. It seems quite frankly an epistemological stretch. Zakaria’s own eulogy of Kissinger on CNN.com refutes Ferguson’s labored thesis:
In a country of optimists, Henry Kissinger was a European pessimist. He began his career worrying about nuclear weapons and ended it worrying about artificial intelligence. Over the years, in our conversations, he would speculate gloomily that Japan was going to become a nuclear power, that Europe would fall apart, and that Islamic extremism would triumph. In our last lunch, just a few weeks ago, he worried about Israel’s ability to survive in the long run.
And yet, Zakaria closed the show with Ferguson. We won’t entertain the possibility that this just two Kissinger admirers hugging their Master close. There was, as you can imagine, no dissent among the eulogists; it was all speak-no-ill-of-the-dead on CNN on Sunday morning last. Granted, Kissinger was — aside from, I’m sure, a charming lunchtime companion to Zakaria — a friend, or “ally,” or “cultivated friendship” or whatever it is that members of the overclass call one another in their tribal rituals. Zakaria, by the way, has every right to be a Kissinger whisperer on the death of his friend, to fill in the blanks of what the observer on the street cannot see in close quarters of the man. For example, Zakaria told his viewers that Kissinger was “warm,” however doubtful that might sound to the viewer (Averted Gaze). Perfectly within this rights on his show, however. I certainly don’t fault him at all for trying to humanize his friend in death.
But Zakaria is also a journalist — a highly compensated one — of perhaps the most influential weekly global news program on American cable and should have done better by his audience, inviting at least a single Kissinger dissenter from the anti-Establishmentarian left to help render final verdict on the man. The absence of a Kissinger critic on the program was a glaring omission, particularly considering that the show is squarely on the side of democratic institutions in the ongoing war against authoritarian tendencies. Because no matter how enchanting and witty Kissinger was at lunch in Cambridge or in DC over Chablis, the hundreds of thousands of dead borwn human beings deserve a voice at the table at CNN. Instead, however, Zakaria took the role of Kissinger “dissenter” on himself. As you can imagine, Zakaria playing devil’s advocate to Ferguson’s Kissinger-apologist played out, in real time, as naught else but utterly farcical.
Zakaria closed out the show asking about Cambodia and then Bangladesh, allowing Ferguson — what a surprise — to filibuster, at length, in defense of Kissinger’s megadeaths. Zakaria allowed Ferguson to go on for so long that he literally ran out the clock. In the middle of a tirade about the “double standard” inflicted upon poor, dead Kissinger, Fareed interjected — only to say that the show was, in fact, over. “We're flat out of time, we will have you on again as we always do. Thank you for that.” Not time for the postprandial brandies, Niall.
Henry Kissinger was an Establishmentarian’s Establishmentarian. The template; Giuliani wanted to be Henry when he grew up, politically. Even a jaded member of the ruling class like Michael Bloomberg desired, madly, to spend time in Kissinger’s shadow, kissing the ring. Bloomberg sought, like many of Kissinger’s Establishmentarian admirers, to borrow some of the “great man’s” glory, as if by sheer proximity he might also be caught in the Velasquez court painting of his life. Kissinger is almost universally revered by the ruling class, by the overclass, as being an “achiever,” a paragon of Power, Intelligence and Celebrity (hundreds of thousands of dead human beings notwithstanding, you understand). His resume, the outward trappings of intellectualism and sophistication are what they all — from Bill Blass to Eric Schmidt to Diane von Furstenberg — seek to emulate. Finally, it was his sheer longevity — 100 years — that which allowed him to outlive a lot of his natural enemies and even hint at something of the suggestion of “immortality,” or what at least passes for such among such devoted materialists.
Fareed Zakaria, unfortunately, chose to tell the Establishment’s tribal version of the life of Henry Kissinger rather than the actual one. As a journalist he should have known — and done — better.
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