Henry Kissinger

With the appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, we are reprinting excerpts of this column from 1971. The full text will appear in People Versus Profits, the Columns of Victor Perlo, to be released by International Publishers in the Spring.

February 20, 1971

Foreign affairs are run by President Nixon and his special advisor, Henry Kissinger. This partnership might seem puzzling. The president never knew Kissinger, who was a political opponent of his in 1968.

Why did Nixon give him such supreme power? Kissinger spends hours with Nixon privately, almost daily. He is part of and often chairman of every major committee that meets with Nixon. He runs the National Security Council and the network of special committees under it. He also chairs the ’40 Committee’ for Covert Action, a secret bunch that plots all the dirty tricks of imperialism, from the Bay of Pigs and similar sneak attacks to assassination of political opponents.

One basis of Kissinger’s position is the conformity of his politics to Nixon’s. German born, and very conscious of it, Kissinger has the revenge-seeker’s hatred of the Soviet Union. No few refugees from Hitler Germany, as well as Nazis taken prisoner by U.S. forces, became particularly active servants of U.S. imperialism’s attempt to take over where Hitler left off in trying to destroy communism and conquer the world. And there is no need to qualify the comparison on the grounds that Kissinger is a Jew. He represents those German Jewish capitalists whose only criticism of Hitler was that he was anti-Semitic.

Kissinger came to this country at the age of 15, in 1938. His well-to-do family sent him to Harvard, his brother to Princeton. While Henry became a big political wheel, his brother W.B. became an armament-oriented manufacturer.

Henry Kissinger graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1950 and immediately became a government consultant on military and foreign policy issues. In 1954, he was made director of nuclear weapons and foreign policy research for the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the top private foreign policy group of America’s most powerful tycoons. In 1956 he became director of the Rockefeller Brothers’ Special Studies project. This project worked out the Rockefeller Group’s basic cold war policy manifestoes, which in large part were adopted by successive administrations in Washington.

On every issue Kissinger is on the side of aggression, confrontation and war. He opposes withdrawal of U.S. troops from Western Europe. He inspired the campaign against the easing of relations between the USSR and West Germany. He envisages a permanent war of conquest in Southeast Asia.

Hard-line cold warriors are no rarity in academic and political circles. Kissinger is especially hard-line, energetic, and able. He was picked by the Rockefellers, three of whom are overseers of Harvard, and a leading force on the Council of Foreign Relations. Ever since 1956, Kissinger has been the Rockefeller family’s chief foreign policy adviser. He was right-hand man to Rockefeller during the 1968 Republican nomination campaign, when Nixon won out.

Why did Nixon then pick his chief rival’s emissary as his own key man after Kissinger had let the world know how little he thought of Nixon?

We do not know the mechanics of how it was arranged. But we do know that Rockefeller men have been in charge of the foreign policy of the United States continuously for 18 years – Dulles, Herter, Rusk, and now Kissinger.

The Wall Street Establishment finances the major candidates, Nixon as well as Eisenhower as well as Kennedy as well as Johnson. No man can be elected, within Establishment-controlled parties, without its approval, without certain commitments and deals. And the most influential single force in the Wall Street Establishment these days is the Rockefeller-Standard Oil-Chase Manhattan Bank group. Apparently it is understood that they are to have foreign affairs, regardless of who wins out in primary and final election skirmishing, and regardless of the personal fate of an individual Rockefeller running for office.

One may say that Henry Kissinger, this arrogant, dangerous man, is the choice of the bigwigs of the oligarchy, the Wall Street Establishment, to be their instrument on the spot for direction of the foreign policy of the United States.