Taki's Mag

Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon

In a recent New York Times book review, Henry Kissinger says that according to Dean Acheson, “leaving high office is like the end of a great love affair—a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensibilities and focused concerns.”

Dr. K. should know. He is famous for saying that “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” He was a swinger in his younger days and knew quite a few beauties in his time. He then married the very graceful and extremely supportive Nancy and has lived happily ever after. I am a great fan of his and consider him a modern Machiavelli—meant in the best possible way.

In the aforementioned review of a George F. Kennan biography—Kennan was a giant among giants of the immediate postwar period who predicted the Soviet Union’s implosion forty years before it happened—Kissinger gives generous credit to other foreign secretaries, especially the two great ones: Dean Acheson under Truman and John Foster Dulles under Eisenhower. Acheson helped devise the Marshall Plan. He created NATO and brought West Germany into the fold. John Foster Dulles strengthened the alliance through the Baghdad Pact (Middle East) and SEATO (Southeast Asia), the latter of which bottled up the then-belligerent Soviets without firing a shot.

Kissinger was fortunate to serve an intelligent president such as Nixon. I believe the much-maligned Nixon was the greatest postwar president, with his inroads to China and the Soviets eventually leading to the latter’s collapse. In Kissinger, Nixon found the greatest and most learned adviser, something for which the Beltway morons and leftist media will never forgive Dr. Henry. What I have never understood was the reasoning behind their hate. What was Hank supposed to do? Sabotage Uncle Sam because old bag Katharine Graham didn’t like the president and preferred the company of a tart such as Pamela Harriman?

Think of today’s bunch—starting with Clinton and W.—and really, really weep. Clinton the draft-dodger bombed Serbia for 73 days and nights, while Bush and Cheney, who between them took more draft deferments than I’ve known hookers in my life, began the bloodiest of wars for absolutely no reason except to make Likud sleep better at night. One trillion dollars later and millions of refugees, plus dead and wounded in the hundreds of thousands, these two clowns are not only walking around free, they even find publishers to justify their monstrous acts against humanity. Go figure, as they used to say in Piraeus. Kissinger said that wars are “fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat.” The Wolfowitzes and their ilk knew this, and they managed to convince the idiotic Dubya that Saddam had the bomb and was ready to use it. And it is exactly what is happening where Tehran is concerned. The Likudists are on the march again and need dumb Uncle Sam to bomb Iran.

But why am I writing about these catamites? I have never held nor aspired to high office, but I can tell you one thing: The end of an era is even worse than the end of a great love affair. In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, there was a picture of Coco Chanel surrounded by eight of her beautiful models. It was taken in 1959 and I knew all of them except for Mademoiselle Chanel—as they all called her—but two of them had been very grand love affairs.

Mine were the two prettiest by far. The affairs took place four years apart, in 1959 and 1963. I was 23 and 27; they were 25 and 28. Both were married, and both marriages collapsed, but they were already cracked, as they used to say in Brooklyn. Both ladies were known as the most beautiful in the City of Light, which was renowned for its beauties. Both had that nonchalant grace for which American women are not known. Both were ethereal creatures who managed to retain their beauty to old age. (One is gone.)

Seeing the picture brought a kind of pain only sensitive souls such as the poor little Greek boy can feel, but it also reminded me of the void left by the disappearance of “heightened sensitivities and focused concerns.”

I never met Chanel, although she advised both of her girls to marry me—she told them Greeks are good fathers and love their children. (It had nothing to do with me, but rather my own father. She had asked them my age and if I had money, and both had answered that I did not but my father did; hence the advice.) In today’s world, where people are either asleep or online, I miss that wonderful Paris era when I was young and had a couple of Chanel’s girls at my beck and call.