John M. Owen IV at The Hedgehog Review:
For someone who craved attention, who cultivated reporters and published several memoirs, Henry A. Kissinger liked secrecy. Or better put, he wanted others to keep secrets so that he could reveal them when and how he chose. The lengthy obituary in the New York Times recalls that in 1969, his first year as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, he was so infuriated by leaks from the White House on the war in Indochina that he had the FBI tap the phones of a number of aides. “If anybody leaks in this administration,” he declared, “I will be the one to leak.”
The story is revealing. Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it—in the White House, in the State Department, and around the world. But his death at age 100 leaves us with a puzzle. How is it that this brilliant student of the liberal philosopher Immanuel Kant, this one-time refugee so grateful to America for taking his family in, misunderstood the force of democracy?
More here.