Kissinger had an interesting op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal:
I thought it was interesting history, but at first I
wondered why he wrote it. I guess it’s in the WSJ because of the French
election and what Kissinger says about the importance of a united Europe.
It also sounds like he has a personal fondness for Adenauer that he wanted to
get on the record. Kissinger is unique. He has written a relatively
long piece about Germany just after WW II and does not mention the Holocaust
once, despite being an ethnic Jew. He has high praise for Adenauer and by
implication the Germans who worked with him after the war. My experience
is, especially after my Poland tour, that as soon as you mention WW II to a Jew
they start talking about how horrible the Holocaust was, and often think the US
let the Germans off too lightly despite the Nuremberg trials.
The one time I met Kissinger was on a Sunday afternoon while
I was working in the current intelligence office of the State Department
operations center in the 1970s. We got a highly classified report that
Anwar Sadat, who was at that moment in the US on an official visit, was going
to be assassinated. (They just got the time and place wrong, but it’s
like the stopped watch that is going to be right sometime.) Anyway we
decided we should probably tell somebody about this report; so, I took it the
50 yards down the hall to the Secretary’s office in a locked pouch. There
was nobody there but his private secretary, who said he was in a conference
room in the back. So I walked another 25 yards down a warren of corridors to a
little conference room where he was sitting with Assistant Secretary Philip
Habib. I was going to hand him the report, but he said just tell me what
it says. So I told him; he said thanks, and that was it. I think
Sadat was around for several years after that. Ford must have been
President at that time, and Kissinger was his Secretary of State.
There’s another interesting historical piece in today’s NYT
on Central Europe:
It’s probably interesting to me because of the Polish
connection -- King Sobieski’s defense of Vienna against the Turks. It’s
another pro-EU article before the French election. He calls the EU “the
necessary empire.” The EU can theoretically help knit together the ethnic
rivalries of old Europe – Roman Catholic Slavs, Russian Orthodox Slavs,
Muslims, etc., but I’m not sure it is up to the task at the moment if it can
hardly keep the French on board. Nevertheless, the history of the Balkans
is interesting. A more assertive Russia and Turkey versus a weakening EU
could presage a resurfacing of these old rivalries.
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