Nixon and Kissinger's dysfunctional relationship. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Hitchens reads the new Dallek book, finds it too mild, but uses it as a springboard for some memorable comments.

Nixon and Kissinger's dysfunctional relationship. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

"What an abysmal record of pettiness and spite and nastiness and obscenity is here disclosed. Obviously, none of us would emerge with unstained character if all our private moments could be recorded and transmitted, but it is still a pretty base type of human being—well below the American average—who would react to the disclosure of the My Lai massacre by blaming it on "those dirty rotten Jews from New York." And it is perhaps an even lower sort of person—the Semitic sidekick to this foul-mouthed little Jew-baiter—who would keep smirking and fawning while that kind of thing was being said. Many are the schoolyards that maintain a higher etiquette as between bully and toady.

Of course, the courtier Jew and cringe-meister has his own cheap revenge for the moments of abjection when he briefs members of the press off the record (or so he thinks) and refers to his boss as a "meatball mind," or "our drunken friend," or—even more accurately—as "that madman." Truly, in those years, the United States was a rogue-state banana republic by the classic definition. By that I mean that it had a leader who could not be trusted not to start a war in order to distract attention from domestic crises, a leader who tried to sabotage his political opponents by the use of police tactics, a leader who sponsored terrorism in neighboring countries, and a leader whose personal demons were the terror even of his own cronies."