Now that Henry Kissinger is dead, the time is ripe to reveal my personal relationship with him. In 1969 when I was eight years old and for several years thereafter, Kissinger was my role model. Why, you might wonder, would a child want to emulate Kissinger? My answer is a coming of age tale of political consciousness.
The story of Henry and me actually begins a year earlier, in 1968, during the presidential election pitting Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon. My elementary school in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, organized a week of election-oriented events. Back in ye olde days, civics was a curricular staple. All of us school children were instructed that we would have to choose the candidate we supported and then we would participate in activities organized along partisan lines. Being only seven, I was not sure who I should choose, so I asked my father. His answer was unequivocal: “Nixon. We are Republicans.” Nixon it was.
The last of the week’s events was a life-changing pep rally in the auditorium. All the Humphrey supporters were on one side, and the Nixon supporters were on the other. Two teams of cheerleaders had been imported from the middle school to lead the divided audience in chants. My side chanted “Nixon! Nixon! He’s our man. Humphrey belongs in the garbage can!” I was transfixed. Seeing those cool cheerleaders and hundreds of kids chanting for this guy named Nixon made me think that I would like to be Nixon someday.
The following week Nixon was elected president, so I got to see him regularly on the nightly news. The more I saw, the less I liked. Then I started hearing things about this other guy, Henry Kissinger, who was being touted as a “genius” and “the brains behind the president.” I had started coming into my scholastic own when I was eight when—because?—my third-grade teacher, Miss Gaspari, nurtured my intellectual ego. She praised me as “inquisitive,” a “voracious reader,” and I believe she used the phrase “super-smart” at least once.
I imagine you can see the big reveal coming: Kissinger was smart, I was smart, hence I was like Kissinger. But Kissinger wasn’t just smart. He was cool. I saw photos of him hobnobbing with the stars, like Marlo Thomas, whose That Girl character was the epitome of groovy. If Kissinger knew That Girl, he must be groovy, too. I also picked up that his repartee was famously witty, and I fancied myself a bit of a wit as well. I do not remember if, at that time, I had heard his famous aphorism, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Even if I had, I doubt I would have known what an aphrodisiac was. Miss Gaspari probably didn’t make it one of our weekly vocabulary words.
Having decided that smart, cool, witty Kissinger was a good role model, I became interested in learning what he did for a living. He was Nixon’s National Security Advisor, and in 1973 he also became Secretary of State, which meant that he was involved in international relations. So I became interested in international relations and I aspired to become Secretary of State someday. One of the things I gleaned about Kissinger by watching the news, which linked to the claim that he was the brains behind the president, was that he was very Machiavellian. Like aphrodisiac, I doubt my elementary school self knew who Machiavelli was, but I did understand that the “smart” thing to do was to broker power behind the scenes. For better or worse, I began cultivating a Machiavellian sensibility.
Another event relating to my coming-of-age Kissinger obsession occurred around the same time while I was in third grade. I became friends with a classmate named Donna Orbach. When I told my father about my new friend, he asked me to ask Donna if Bernie Orbach was her father. He was. As it turned out, my father and Bernie had been childhood friends. In 1948, when they were about the age Donna and I were now, Count Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who was sent to Palestine as a United Nations Peace Mediator, was assassinated under what, at the time, were mysterious circumstances. My father and Bernie Orbach used to playfully taunt each other on the playground: “You killed Count Bernadotte!” “No, YOU killed Count Bernadotte!” My father encouraged Donna and me to revive the tradition, which we did.
My admiration for Kissinger and for Donna, both of whom were Jewish, coupled with the fact that Jewish children get presents for eight days during Hanukah, unlike Christians who get presents for only one day on Christmas, made me yearn to be Jewish, too. I told my father: “Let’s be Jewish.” He replied, “We can’t be Jewish. We are Arabs.” Me: “What’s an Arab?” My father’s explanation was elaborate, although at the time I did not understand where it came from. As I realized years later, his explanation was, essentially, the plot line of the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.
My burgeoning interest in international relations and the history of Palestine, and my new-found identity as an Arab American, fueled my interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict which was constantly in the news. And there, too, being all Machiavellian was my role model, Kissinger. As I transitioned to middle school, I started to realize that my political consciousness was becoming paradoxical. Those were the days when “Arab” was increasingly and inextricably associated with “terrorist,” and I was aware that Kissinger was a proponent of that linkage. The confusion this caused was exacerbated by my grandmother, the matriarch of our suburban Pennsylvania family who had immigrated from Syria to the United States in the early 1920s. She rejected the “Arab” label as an embarrassment, and chastised me for using it about myself and our family. She insisted that we were “Phoenicians.” I would have none of that. If I had learned anything from Henry, it was the pride and self-satisfaction that can come from confronting complex challenges. My grandmother’s opinion was a low hurdle. Kissinger was another matter.
The final chapter in my coming-of-age story took place in the spring of 1975 when I was thirteen. My father decided to take me to the Middle East, a first trip there for both of us. He wanted to see the land of his parents. Our first destination was Lebanon. We arrived at the very beginning of April—a date that would become important in retrospect. Beirut seemed astoundingly glamorous to a couple of suburban rubes like my father and me. We stayed in the super-posh Phoenicia Hotel and were taken by some friends of the family to the super-posh Casino du Liban. While my father found the Lebanese people we encountered to be haughty and intimidating, I was dazzled by their elegance and sophistication. My people!
One of the family friends volunteered to take my father and me on a tour. I have no recollection who this man was, but I credit him with midwifing my political awakening. We started the tour in Beirut, leaving the cosmopolitan neighborhood of Ras Beirut to visit—or rather, to look from a vista down on Burj al-Barajneh. Back in 1975, this Palestinian refugee camp was a sprawling ghetto of one-story cinderblock buildings with corrugated steel rooves. As a relatively sheltered middle class American adolescent, I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen poverty concentrated so densely, desperation so evident and relentless. As our guide explained, people had been living in this camp since 1948. Aside from wondering why he called this urbanized place a “camp,” I wondered: How can this be so close to glittering downtown Beirut? Who is responsible for this?
Later that day, we wound our way south and crossed the Lebanese border to visit the abandoned Syrian city of Quneitra on the edge of the Golan Heights. Our guide explained that the city had passed between Syrian control and Israeli occupation several times between 1967 and 1974, when Israeli forces withdrew, but not before destroying everything. The Syrian government had opted to leave the city as it was when they regained it the previous July, a monument to that destruction. As we walked through the bullet-riddled mosque, the bombed-out school, the stripped-to-the-bone hospital, I was stunned that a whole city, a modern, recently inhabited city could be reduced to a topography of ruins. By the end of that day, I was, as they say, “woke.”
My father’s and my trip continued for several weeks. We went to Syria and visited the natal villages of his parents and met our many relatives there. We went to Cairo and played tourist for a few days. By the time we got back to Beirut in late April, the city had been transformed. Something bad had happened, although I didn’t understand what. Tanks and soldiers filled the streets and everyone looked scared. I was perplexed that a city so glittering and glamorous could be transformed into a grey state of siege so quickly.
That trip to the Middle East had awakened me to political realities I could barely comprehend. Over the following months and years, I sought answers to my questions, explanations for the things I had seen. One of the things that came into increasingly stark relief was Kissinger. As I learned more about the role he had played in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the direction he had moved US foreign policy in Southeast Asia and Latin America, I felt sick, as if I had woken up to discover that I had idolized a serial killer.
The up side of disillusionment and the discarding of my childhood role model was a sensation of intellectual freedom. I was free to think against the well-worn political grain of realpolitik that Kissinger represented. The end of Henry and me was a beginning of critical political consciousness. For the role he played in inspiring that, at least, I owe him a small thanks.