Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Henry Kissinger and the long view.
Do the new media—NRO, Fox News, Hugh Hewitt and Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh—make it easier for George W. Bush to garner support from the great middle of the country than it was for Kissinger and Nixon to do so? Might it have made a difference in Vietnam if bloggers had been talking back every day to the New York Times? What does the former secretary of state make of Norman Podhoretz’s formulation that the war on radical Islam is properly understood as World War IV? Kissinger has endorsed McCain, but with what degree of enthusiams? Would McCain prove merely preferable to Obama or Clinton? Or decisively superior? And the question that sums up all the others—if Henry Luce called the twentieth century “the American century,” is Henry Kissinger willing to predict that the twenty-first century will prove a second American century
An engrossing intellectual performance—combined, when he addresses himself to the matter of Bush hatred in the mainstrem media, with a sudden display of emotion. Henry Kissinger thinks deeply, of course, but he also feels very deeply.