"Even Mao Zedong displayed a mischievous, almost grandfatherly warmth in private. Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger were both startled..."

"... during their historic 1972 visit to China: Mao joked with them, played with words and made them feel at ease — a deliberate mask concealing one of history’s most devastating authoritarian records. Private interactions, no matter how pleasant, should never influence how we weigh any leader’s record. Matthews softened his judgment of Castro after their personal encounter, helping shape American perceptions of the Cuban revolution — perceptions that soon collided with reality. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain trusted Adolf Hitler’s private assurances during their meetings, describing Hitler afterward as a man with whom he could 'do business' — just before Europe descended into war."

Writes León Krauze in "Bill Maher went to Washington. He got played. Authoritarians always smile in private — especially to journalists" (WaPo).

"Matthews" = Herbert Matthews, who interviewed Castro in 1957, and wrote in the NYT: "The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him."

"I'm looking for famous quotes that express the idea that the person who controls X controls Y."

That's how I prompted Grok just now. I was inspired by something Kakistocracy wrote in the comments in last night's café:

It’s weird to think that Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter.* To be fair -- what he paid for twitter was kinda the down payment for the presidency. It was a package deal. He needed both.

Here are the quotes Grok fished up for me: 

• "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." This quote from George Orwell's "1984" emphasizes how control over information (history) leads to control over future outcomes.

• "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws." Attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, this quote suggests that control over a nation's monetary system equates to control over its governance.

• "He who controls the media, controls the mind." This is a variation on a quote by Jim Morrison, highlighting how control over information dissemination (media) can shape public perception and behavior.

• "Control the money, you control countries. Control the food, you control the world." A quote often attributed to Henry Kissinger illustrates the power of controlling essential resources like finance and food to influence global or national control.

I'd like to have those 4 over to dinner at the same time. We could talk about controlling things. Who would control the conversation, hmmm? I say Orwell. 

Anyway, Grok and I — at my prompting — proceeded to talk about the ancient Archimedes quote "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." (It's different from those other 4 quotes, but not completely different.) And then I fed Kakistocracy's quote to Grok thusly: 

"Back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the latest dance craze was the Frug, Washington high society was transfixed by..."

"... Barbara Howar, a sparkling socialite from North Carolina who helped the first lady do her hair, mingled with a visiting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon and turned her Georgetown home into a center of Swinging Sixties entertainment.... Defiantly unorthodox, she wore pajamas to an embassy gala, drove an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park and had a barbed wit that brought her a reputation as the enfant terrible of the capital’s social scene. Reflecting on the private life of Henry Kissinger, one of many diplomats and politicians who frequented her parties over the years, she quipped, 'Henry’s idea of sex is to slow the car down to 30 miles an hour when he drops you off at the door.'..."

From "Barbara Howar, whose hit memoir dished on D.C. society, dies at 89/Initially known as a Georgetown hostess, she became a best-selling author with her candid 1973 memoir, 'Laughing All the Way.' She later interviewed celebrities for 'Entertainment Tonight'" (WaPo)(free access link).

Howar launched her writing career with a 1968 Ladies’ Home Journal story called "Why LBJ Dropped Me." Looking (unsuccessfully) for a copy of "Why LBJ Dropped Me," I stumbled into this cool photograph, "Singer Bobby Darin sits with his girlfriend, Barbara Howar." I love her shoe. Grommets — so 60s! Ah, well, the 60s are long gone, and here I am, a creature of the 60s, entertained by obituaries, saying goodbye to everyone who was tormented by LBJ and danced the frug.

You don't see the phrase "enfant terrible" so much anymore. The OED says it's "A child who embarrasses his or her elders by untimely remarks; transferred a person who compromises his or her associates or his or her party by unorthodox or ill-considered speech or behaviour; loosely, one who acts unconventionally." We used to celebrate the enfants terribles. Didn't we? Do we still? Answer without saying "Trump" or you are too boring to wear pajamas to an embassy gala and drive an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park.

"The leaders of the world have failed. They have failed to master the overriding concepts, the fundamentals and the day-to-day tactics."

"Societies have to find a way to solve their problems without continuously having a series of conflicts. That is the challenge. We have been facing a period of constant conflict resulting in a major wars destroying much of the civilization that has been built."

Said Henry Kissinger, on October 18, 2023, quoted in "Henry Kissinger’s (Maybe) Last Interview: Drop the Two-State Solution/In one of the final interviews before he died, the famous statesman said the two-state solution was no longer viable and that the U.S. must reconcile with China" (Politico).

"He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr."

With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.... He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial. He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region. Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize...."

Writes David Sanger, in "Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped Nation’s Cold War History/The most powerful secretary of state of the postwar era, he was both celebrated and reviled. His complicated legacy still resonates in relations with China, Russia and the Middle East" (NYT).

With an eye fixed on the great power rivalry, he was often willing to be crudely Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations that he often regarded as pawns in the greater battle. 

"That’s nice. But many of my generation will not make it to 100 … in fact did not make it to 25 … because of your father. They died in Vietnam."

The top-rated comment — one of many similar and utterly predictable comments — on "My father, Henry Kissinger, is turning 100. This is his guide to longevity" (WaPo).

"Well, that game's over! 74 years is enough of that!"

Announces Meade, channeling the mindset of Gallup, after reading "Did Gallup End 'Most Admired' 74-Year Polling Tradition to Avoid Trump Placing First?"

Yes, the admiration of human beings is a dangerous business. Why not back off? I remember when The Ladies Home Journal used to produce lists of the 10 "favorite heroes and heroines" of boys and girls, something I blogged about back in 2005, with a photograph from my copy of the 1977 best-seller "The Book of Lists":

Henry Kissinger! And yet:

The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula.

How could Nixon be worse than Hitler? And yet he was. Things near in time seem more important. How will Trump look as he fades into the distance? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I don't know if he's in the process of fading right now or the process of bouncing back. He is very bouncy.

"I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences."

"It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident...."

Said Henry Kissinger, quoted in The Financial Times, which picks out a different quote for the title, "Henry Kissinger: ‘We are in a very, very grave period.'"

The FT editor talking to Kissinger is Edward Luce, and he sets the scene:

By now we are on to the coffee. Mine is a double espresso. Kissinger has mint tea. ... 

He paraphrases his own questions, then gives a verbatim quote from Kissinger:

You are worried about the future. However, you believe there is a non-trivial chance that Trump could accidentally scare us into reinventing the rules-based order that we used to take for granted. Is that a fair summary?

“I think we are in a very, very grave period for the world,” Kissinger replies. “I have conducted innumerable summit meetings, so they didn’t learn this one [Helsinki] from me.”

It is clear he will not elaborate further.

Is it a very, very grave period because of Trump or is Trump the hope of getting out of the grave circumstance?

I ask him which period he would liken to today. Kissinger talks about his experience as a freshly minted citizen in US uniform serving in the second world war....

I just have to say that if I were editing this article, I'd never allow the phrase "freshly minted citizen" to appear so close to "mint tea." "Mint" is a word at the unusualness level where you can't reuse it to refer to something else. The mint tea was real, so that's the "mint" that should stay. The "mint" in "freshly minted citizen" is a metaphor, comparing a human being to a coin and evoking an image of stamping that person into a new form. I wouldn't write that even if Kissinger had sipped camomile tea.

I see this as a sign that the Comey testimony fizzled: The Daily Beast has a headline: "James Comey Is The Sex Symbol America Needs Right Now."

That's by Lizzie Crocker and published today. Excerpt:

And so the 56-year-old, fired FBI director became a very unlikely sex symbol. Sure, he has a somewhat peaked complexion and under-eye bags that look like half-inflated tubular balloons. But he's handsome, and as with all sex symbols--both the unlikely ones and the obvious ones--he embodies certain qualities in society that we all lust after: integrity, emotional complexity, and quiet but certain confidence.

That combined with his imposing physical stature gives him the same alluring masculinity as sex symbols like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (particularly Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice).

In Italy on Friday, my Daily Beast colleague Barbie Latza Nadeau reports that there was "a ten-minute segment on Italian prime time TV about whether Comey would be a good lover because of the “length of his digits.”...

[Comey's] charisma and acclaimed public behavior makes you look at him afresh. After all, Comey most definitely wasn't seen as a sex symbol when he helped torpedo Hillary Clinton's election chances just a few days before the election. The public winds of approval--the perception of heroism or doing good or speaking truth to power--must be blowing in the right direction for a moment to erupt as it did on Thursday, when suddenly all the feels were for Comey....

Well, why not? Politics is all about "the feels." Let's be honest. Henry Kissinger famously said "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," but Crocker's not saying that. For her, it's not power per se. The power must be exercised in proper direction. It wasn't sexy to — trigger warning — "torpedo" Hillary. But it is sexy to aim the lengthy projectile at the notoriously short-fingered Trump.

And yet, that's what you say, but what about your closely held secret thoughts, your dreams? How well I remember, back in May 2012, a woman who called herself "Violated" wrote in to the the Isthmus advice columnist:

I'm a public employee, a liberal and a volunteer for Democrat Tom Barrett in the upcoming recall election. But here's my problem: I've been having sexual dreams about Gov. Scott Walker. Help!

I should mention that I'm happily married, with an attractive husband. In my waking life, I do not consider our extreme right-wing governor physically attractive. On the contrary, I recoil from the sight of him, with his politician's haircut and blank expression. During last year's protests at the Capitol, however, I woke up one morning from a dream in which the governor and I were...well, you know. It was hot, but it was also disturbing. I took an extra-long shower that morning to wash away the sensation.

I didn't tell my husband or my friends about the dream, because I didn't want to gross them out. I also didn't want them to think less of me. But since then, I've had two more such dreams. I finally fessed up, hoping to get some advice. First, why am I having sexual dreams about someone I can't stand and don't find attractive in the slightest? And second, how can I get my brain to stop playing this horrible trick on me?

The advice columnist suggested that the woman look at pictures of Tom Barrett to try to fixate on him...



... and we had some fun with that here at Meadhouse.

The "shocking experience" and "extraordinary opportunity" that is Donald Trump.

On last Sunday's "Face the Nation," we heard from Henry Kissinger:

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office, at the same time, extraordinary opportunity. And I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president, because every country now has two things to consider, one, their perception that... the outgoing president basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities, and, secondly, that here is a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions. And because of the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it. I’m not saying it will. I’m saying it’s an extraordinary opportunity.

Question: Does Cher still go on television and sing "I Got You Babe"?

Answer: Yes.



That's painful. Or so I thought for most of the performance... which has her singing with the Late Late Show's James Corden, who's sort of in the Sonny role, but also looking and acting like Cher. The joke is that the song is modernized to refer to swiping on an iPhone and "Netflix and chill" and sexting and deleting porn history and calling your relationship "offish" (which is better than the word it's treated as rhyming with — "marriage"). I was cringing in the pain but as it went on — with both Cher and Corden totally committed to making a joke out of the song — I stopped feeling bad for Cher and I finally realized that this actually is exactly the kind of comedy Cher did with Sonny on her old TV show. She's a great comedienne and not just a movie actress comedienne, but a TV comedienne, which means selling some half-assed sketches. It's not easy. It takes real skill and nerve.

"For most of the last year, we have seen endless hand-wringing in the news media about how crude Donald Trump is..."

"But it seems obvious to me that it is Trump’s enemies, far more than Trump, who have gone into the gutter and, to a degree that may be unprecedented, coarsened our political life," writes John Hinderaker at Power Line, on the occasion of that naked Donald Trump statues that stood in 5 American cities yesterday. "When it comes to crude, beyond the pale attacks, Donald Trump is far more often the victim than the aggressor," Hinderaker concludes.

I agree that there is more crudeness in the attacks on Trump than coming from Trump himself. However:

1. Parallelism seems to demand that we compare what Trump himself says to what the another candidate says. If we want to look at what people other than candidates are saying about Trump, we should compare it not just to what Trump says, but to what his supporters say and to what everyone who hates Hillary says — including speech in the form of sculpture and drawings and paintings. There's some pretty crude stuff out there.

2. And shouldn't there be crude attacks on political candidates, in words and in graphic depictions? This is a grand tradition! I celebrate it. I'm thinking of Daumier's Gargantua...



Daumier went to prison for that. And I'm thinking of David Levine's Henry Kissinger.

3. The brutality is already there in politics, so we should have the words and pictures to express it. Here's Frank Zappa saying that on "Crossfire" in 1986:



"[Brutality] is already in politics. I think if you use the so-called strong words, you get your point across faster and you can save a lot of beating around the bush. Why are people afraid of words?" (And note that Donald Trump just yesterday was defending his style of speech as a way to save time: The important thing is to get to the truth and being too careful and polite "takes far too much time.")

"Talking about art without looking at art is difficult, but Navasky explained to his young audience that their teachers didn’t want them to see the cartoon he had just described."

"However, he said slyly, it was easily found on the Internet; just Google 'David Levine Kissinger.' Hundreds of high school students whipped out their phones, typed in the words, and – voila! – there was Kissinger, screwing the world. Needless to say, the kids cheered in appreciation."

From "A real lesson in freedom of expression" ("What if you were invited to a discussion about freedom of speech and part of your presentation was censored?").

Stunning pro-Trump propaganda from Drudge.

Wow. The restoration of youth to the face, the unfathomable color, the earthquake terminology — "TRUMP SHAKES WORLD ORDER."

The link goes to a tame Reuters item: "Foreign diplomats voicing alarm to U.S. officials about Trump." ("On Tuesday, General Philip Breedlove, the United States' top military commander in Europe, said... 'I get a lot of questions from our European counterparts on our election process this time in general... And I think they see a very different sort of public discussion than they have in the past.'")

The phrase "World Order" does not appear in the Reuters article. It sounds foreboding. I see that Henry Kissenger published a book 2 years ago with the title "World Order." From the NYT review:

There has always been a dark, almost Spenglerian cast to Mr. Kissinger’s thinking, and he sees ominous signs today of a descent back into a Hobbesian state of nature — in the bedlam overtaking Syria and Iraq, where “no common rules other than the law of superior force” seem to hold; in the spread of weapons of mass destruction and “the persistence of genocidal practices”; and in the Wild West of cyberspace, which has “revolutionized vulnerabilities.” In fact, he says, we are “insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world order,” at this moment in history when “chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence.”

"'I absolutely love this job,' [John Kerry] told me more than once. “It is so much fun.”

Me = David Remnick, in The New Yorker, who drops that quote right after this description of a few weeks in the life of John Kerry:

One day, his plane settled in Samarkand, where he patiently endured a forty-five-minute lecture from the dictator of Uzbekistan. The next day, he was in Ashgabat, the surreal, peopleless capital of Turkmenistan, a hermetic state where the post-Soviet dictator renamed the days of the week and devoted a national day to the muskmelon. Kerry had flown to Santiago to take part in a conference to save the world’s oceans. Then he was in Paris, in the wake of the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall, to join talks designed to rescue the earth from overheating to the point of global catastrophe.

Can you detect Remnick's opinion of Kerry in those 4 sentences? I think he doesn't want to speak ill of him — not outright — but he sees him as a sad failure. Here's one more paragraph from the article. Test my theory:

But while Kerry made his name in a radical voice, he was always a man of the establishment. More than any diplomat or politician this side of Bill Clinton, he has an abiding faith in the value of personal relationships and of his capacity to persuade. All he has to do is get the parties in a room and he can’t lose. Obama, by contrast, has no more cultivated relationships with foreign leaders than he has with Republican leaders. Where Obama is skeptical, Kerry is almost sentimental in his optimism. He has even made his peace with Henry Kissinger: “I seek his advice—he’s a brilliant guy.” He recounted a lunch that they had recently, at which Kissinger told him, “The difference between you and me is that I think that personal relations don’t matter much. I think interests matter.” Kerry replied, “I think interests matter, of course, but I think personal relations can help matters—they can be influential.”

And, a bit later:

There is no concealing his eagerness to make a deal; to a critic, his style is reminiscent of the customer who sternly tells the salesman, “I’m not leaving here until you sell me a car.” No one seems to inspire Kerry’s outrage, including the worst of his negotiating partners. “I think they want to be valued for who they are and understood for where they come from and what their life is about,” he told me. “I think if people have a sense that you know what they’re about, they can build some trust with you....”

But don't you have a sense that they know what you're about? What if they see you as an over-optimistic sentimentalist who really wants to make a deal and to feel that he has a relationship with you?

"Get outta here, you low-life scum."

John McCain to Code Pink protesters who held signs and chanted "Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes" right next to the 91-year-old Kissinger as he sat at the witness table before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Nixon: "Let me say something before we get off the gay thing. I don’t want my views misunderstood."

"I am the most tolerant person on that of anybody in this shop. They have a problem. They’re born that way. You know that. That’s all. I think they are."

Anyway, my point is, though, when I say they’re born that way, the tendency is there. [But] my point is that Boy Scout leaders, YMCA leaders, and others bring them in that direction, and teachers. And if you look over the history of societies, you will find, of course, that some of the highly intelligent people . . . Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, were all homosexuals. Nero, of course, was, in a public way, in with a boy in Rome.

Haldeman: There’s a whole bunch of Roman emperors. . . .

Nixon: But the point is, look at that, once a society moves in that direction, the vitality goes out of that society. Now, isn’t that right, Henry?

"Rest in peace SHAME!"

Only one mean image mixed in with the the BBB's otherwise lovely collection of pictures from the funeral of Baroness Thatcher.

ADDED: Here's the NYT article:

"This, at Lady Thatcher’s personal request, is a funeral service, not a memorial service with the customary eulogies. At such a time, the parson should not aspire to the judgments which are proper to the politician; instead this is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling."...

There was no immediate sign of large-scale protests by anti-Thatcher demonstrators but the police kept watch on anyone who might seem suspicious....

At Ludgate Circus, close to St. Paul’s, a small group of protesters gathered, some with banners reading: “Now bury Thatcherism.” Some jeered and shouted, “good riddance.”

Which Americans are in attendance? 3 former Secretaries of State: Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz, and James A. Baker 3d.

"President Obama did not send a senior serving member of his administration."

For comparison purposes.

Are those comediennes funnier than these?

And let's try to think deeply about gender politics. There's something distinctive about the argument — coming from females — that we will withhold sex unless you give us something we want. The argument, even as joke, assumes the audience grasps the notion sex is not intrinsically valuable to women. It's currency to be used to purchase something else.

In contrast to the idea of women exercising power by withholding sex is the idea that men seek political power to get sex. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" is something famously said by a man who looked liked this:



That's Henry Kissinger in his younger days. Think he would have had much political success saying do what I want or I won't have sex with you? No. It was the other way around for him. By acquiring power he became seductive.

Perhaps men have had such success reaching high positions of political power because of their sexual drive. If sexual energy propels their climb to power, it's surprising women ever win elections. Why bother? I mean, really. Why bother? They must really want political power as an end in itself. And... well, there's this:

Surprise! Nixon had qualms about mass nuclear destruction.

The NYT reports:

Widely considered a military hawk, President Richard M. Nixon fretted privately over the notion of any no-holds-barred nuclear war, newly released documents from his time at the White House reveal.

The recently declassified papers, from the first days of the Nixon presidency in 1969 until the end of 1974, show that Nixon wanted an alternative to the option of full-scale nuclear war - a plan for a gentler war, one that could ultimately vanquish the Soviet Union while avoiding the worst-case situation.

The papers provided a glimpse behind the scenes at efforts to find choices other than "the horror option," as the national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, called the worst-case scripts for all-out nuclear war that were then in place.

It would be surprising if Nixon didn't have qualms. It's a long crazy step from "military hawk" to feeling at ease with the prospect of killing millions of human beings.

The documents reveal Mr. Kissinger's chilling insight that government budget-crunchers would prefer complete nuclear warfare because it was already planned for and would be cheaper than recasting American capabilities to permit limited strikes.

"They believe in assured destruction because it guarantees the smallest expenditure," he said in August 1973 at a National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room. "To have the only option that of killing 80 million people is the height of immorality."

This is what is shocking.