Similarities
I am not saying that the points I am going to make are very politically significant or have any great value in terms of good and evil. At best they are an indication of how the Republican Party of the US deals with particular situations.
Has anyone noticed how hugely similar Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice are? In 1968 and in 2000, a Republican candidate wins an election. He is ferociously hated by the Democrats and the left, and is widely suspected of having stolen the election; certainly his opponents will never believe anything else. His posture is populist and he speaks as the opponent of the West and East Coast "elites". While his first election had been disputed, his second is a cakewalk: he trounces a candidate who is the expression of that "elitist" hard-left mentality which he denounces.
In both cases, the Republican populist invites a person with no political background, but plenty of academic prestige, to be his national security adviser; and in both cases, this academic is promoted to Secretary of State in his second administration. In both cases, these are people whose intellectual abilities demand respect even from opponents, and whose stature in the administration quickly comes to seem unique. (A joke going around in the Nixon year said, "Do you realize that if Kissinger died now, Nixon would become President?" And Dr.Rice is still being held forward, in spite of her repeated and vehement denials, as the likeliest Republican candidate at the next elections.) Kissinger is a German Jewish refugee who to this day speaks English with the thickest of German accents, and Rice is an African-American woman and quite likely a lesbian. That is, each of them, in their turn, had a background which was by his or her time wholly respectable, but which had just enough of perceived difference and of memories of prejudice, discrimination, and even violence, to draw attention to themselves in the largely WASP world of the Republican Party. Kissinger had escaped Hitler as a young Jewish man, and Rice, as a child, survived a Ku Klux Klan bomb outrage that killed four of her girl friends. So you might say that they both could be held to show that there were no locked gates in the Republican party for people of merit and distinction. Finally, they both have a whiff of that European culture that the Anglo-Saxons both fear and over-rate; Kissinger with his German professor's stance, attitude and accent, and Rice with her classical music training and foreign languages (and enough chic to get by in Paris and Milan).
As I said, I do not think that this has any enormous amount of meaning. But it is interesting.
Has anyone noticed how hugely similar Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice are? In 1968 and in 2000, a Republican candidate wins an election. He is ferociously hated by the Democrats and the left, and is widely suspected of having stolen the election; certainly his opponents will never believe anything else. His posture is populist and he speaks as the opponent of the West and East Coast "elites". While his first election had been disputed, his second is a cakewalk: he trounces a candidate who is the expression of that "elitist" hard-left mentality which he denounces.
In both cases, the Republican populist invites a person with no political background, but plenty of academic prestige, to be his national security adviser; and in both cases, this academic is promoted to Secretary of State in his second administration. In both cases, these are people whose intellectual abilities demand respect even from opponents, and whose stature in the administration quickly comes to seem unique. (A joke going around in the Nixon year said, "Do you realize that if Kissinger died now, Nixon would become President?" And Dr.Rice is still being held forward, in spite of her repeated and vehement denials, as the likeliest Republican candidate at the next elections.) Kissinger is a German Jewish refugee who to this day speaks English with the thickest of German accents, and Rice is an African-American woman and quite likely a lesbian. That is, each of them, in their turn, had a background which was by his or her time wholly respectable, but which had just enough of perceived difference and of memories of prejudice, discrimination, and even violence, to draw attention to themselves in the largely WASP world of the Republican Party. Kissinger had escaped Hitler as a young Jewish man, and Rice, as a child, survived a Ku Klux Klan bomb outrage that killed four of her girl friends. So you might say that they both could be held to show that there were no locked gates in the Republican party for people of merit and distinction. Finally, they both have a whiff of that European culture that the Anglo-Saxons both fear and over-rate; Kissinger with his German professor's stance, attitude and accent, and Rice with her classical music training and foreign languages (and enough chic to get by in Paris and Milan).
As I said, I do not think that this has any enormous amount of meaning. But it is interesting.