"There are a number of people who will never forgive [Barack Obama] for being half-black" (the late Stanley Hoffmann)

Plus some thoughts on Zbig Brzezinski, Henry the K,
the brothers Kennedy, and some fellow Frenchies


Harvard Prof. Stanley Hoffmann speaking on European-American relations at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1984

by Ken

The New York Review of Books is remembering a frequent contributor, the late Stanley Hoffmann, longtime professor of international relations at Harvard. who died on September 13, with online publication of a "conversation" drawn from a never-published December 2011 interview with Michal Matlak ("a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a regular contributor to the Polish magazine Liberal Culture").

I've plucked out a few excerpts from those excerpts.


A COUPLE OF HARVARD DEPARTMENTAL COLLEAGUES:
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND HENRY KISSINGER

About Brzezinski, and the radical change he underwent, Hoffmann recalled:

He was always fascinated by and worried about the Soviet Union and nothing else. I liked him very much. But then he was a great supporter of the Vietnam War which I thought was a disaster and unwinnable. Now he has completely changed. I don’t think he remembers that he was such a supporter of the war. I was quite surprised at a conference which took place in Berlin about ten years ago to hear Zbig explaining that what the US did in Vietnam was a form of colonialism. He would never have said that earlier. In other words he was wise enough to change his mind. We are exactly the same age.

Zbig is a complicated guy. There was this permanent battle that went on between Zbig, representing the hard line on Russia, and Cyrus Vance, who wanted more accommodation, more flexibility. And the relations between the two of them were just awful. The story of my department was, for years, the battle between Zbigniew and Henry Kissinger. The difference has been that Kissinger never took Zbigniew seriously, and Zbigniew could not tolerate Henry, because Henry was there always before Zbig in occupying the high positions.

As for Henry the K, Hoffmann said: "I could write a book on Henry, which I will not. Everything is very complicated with Mr. Kissinger."

He did comment on something Kissinger "was very good at":

There was very recently, in The New York Times, a long front-page review by him of a new and very long biography of George Kennan. And what I found remarkable about Henry’s article was that it said nothing. I went through all of it and you don’t know at the end what he really thought. And he was very good at that.

ABOUT THE BROTHERS KENNEDY

After some conversation about "politicians who are able to combine moral ends with Realpolitik, Hoffmann was asked about another possible "successful idealist."

You knew John F. Kennedy. Did he belong to the same group of successful idealists?

Although I knew Kennedy a little, I did not like him, for purely personal reasons. He was very much an opportunist, very intelligent. I knew all three of the Kennedys. The youngest one, Teddy, who died about three years ago, was my student. He was not a genius, but he was a good person. He spent much of his time as a member of the Senate helping people get visas to the United States. He saved people. And he never really thought much about himself, because he didn’t think he was quite smart enough to reach the heights. But I liked him. The other two, Bobby and John Kennedy, struck me as hard-nosed, calculating machines.

So you don’t see in their politics a strong connection to human rights?

I think that the one who developed [this connection]—just before he was murdered—was Bobby Kennedy. He started as an aide of [Republican Senator Joe] McCarthy, so he travelled a great deal, so to speak. John F. Kennedy, I couldn’t quite figure him out. In any case his assassination was a disaster, because his successor, LBJ, did some very good things in some areas relating to human rights, but foreign policy was not his domain. But who are we to pass judgment on everybody?

"FOR THE TIME BEING AMERICA IS UNGOVERNABLE"

About President Obama, Hoffmann expressed admiration for his two books, saying, "He writes well and he is a very good speaker."

[Y]ou have lots of people, including Newt Gingrich and some others, who still wonder whether Obama is really an American. It requires a certain amount of chutzpah for somebody like Obama to be president because he knows there are a number of people who will never forgive him for being half-black. And for the time being America is ungovernable. The Constitution—and all the additions that have been grafted on it—make effective government almost impossible. For almost every important measure you need a 60 percent majority in the Senate. It is almost impossible to get this. So nothing works.

AS YOU CAN NO DOUBT GUESS FROM THE NAME --

Stanley Hoffmann was by birth French. (He had vivid memories of the Nazi occupation of his homeland.) And he had interesting things to say about Europe generally, and in particular about several of his countrymen, including --

• Mitterrand, about whom he wrote a book, and whom he described as "not an admirable politician," "highly intelligent, but also a narcissist."

• De Gaulle, of whom he said, "I have learned more about politics by studying de Gaulle than by studying Mitterand." He admired De Gaulle's being "very flexible when it came to the personalities with whom he worked." "[A]fter the liberation, some of the people who were most useful to France were not politicians or ex-politicians; they were business people, technicians, civil servants, who were totally indifferent to the battles between socialists and Christian democrats."

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Can the culture clash between Obama and Clinton supporters be bridged by November? Remembering the disasters of 1968, Harold Meyerson hopes so

June 5, 1968: The assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy didn't end the culture clash between his supporters and those of his antiwar presidential rival, Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

"[W]hen two distinct political groups, each convinced that it brings something new and historic to its party and its nation, campaign against each other, bringing them together is no easy task, even when no policy matters divide them."

--Harold Meyerson, in his Washington Post column today,
"Patching Up the Democrats"

Mrs. Clinton has already blundered into the subject of the ill-fated 1968 Democratic presidential race, which went through a famous series of convulsions of which she seemed blissfully unaware: the decision by little-known Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy to challenge President Lyndon Johnson's reelection bid on the issue of the Vietnam War; the president's abrupt decision not to run for reelection, leaving the field -- he thought -- to Vice President Hubert Humphrey; New York Sen. Robert Kennedy's long-delayed decision to enter the race; and then, in June, Senator Kennedy's assassination the night he won the California primary.

Harold Meyerson remembers that night with personal vividness:

Forty years ago tonight, I was one of a number of very young staffers on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign crammed into a Los Angeles hotel room, where we watched on television as Robert Kennedy, a few miles down Wilshire Boulevard at the Ambassador Hotel, claimed victory in the California primary. A few minutes later, the networks reported that Kennedy had been shot. The rest of the evening was a mix of anxiety, nausea, tears, misgivings and despair.

What Meyerson also recalls vividly is how different, and all but incompatible, the ranks of McCarthy and Kennedy supporters were while both candidates were in the race, even though "on matters of policy, there were really no significant differences" between the candidates.

We'll never know how that split would have played out. Meyerson notes, "McCarthy himself had planned to stand down and back Kennedy if Kennedy won California and began racking up establishment endorsements." But of course circumstances prevented that from happening.

Then Kennedy was killed. And there was no one to go over to, no one who could lead the antiwar forces to victory in Chicago or the general election. McCarthy did not drop out, and those in the Kennedy column who couldn't stand him persuaded George McGovern to be a last-minute candidate simply to show the flag in Chicago. Four years later, the McCarthy people and the Kennedy people of '68 came together to be the core of McGovern's successful campaign for the nomination. By then, though, Richard Nixon was president, the Vietnam War still raged, and the onetime Gene and Bobby loyalists had to think for a moment to recall what it was that had once so divided them.

I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's equally historic campaigns, and because today's Democrats have been given a chance -- as they were not in 1968 -- to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades. You would think -- well, hope -- that after 40 years, this time they'd get it right.

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I wish her oh-so-sensitive supporters would explain how this appalling stuff just keeps on coming out of the mouth of the Junior Senator from New York

On March 31, 1968, amid growing opposition to the Vietnam War,
and with no end in sight, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced
he would not seek or accept his party's nomination for president.

I'm still trying my darnedest not to say bad things about the junior senator from New York (JSFNY), or to impugn the wisdom of her supporters, without whose votes there is an alarming possibility that the unspeakable McCranky could be elected president -- assuming that this year we're going to revert to the old custom of actually electing a president.

And I feel duly abashed every time the supporters of the JSFNY complain that her enemies (who are, you know, everywhere) always assume the worst about her while assuming the best about, well, apparently everyone else on the planet. Even though my own observations are that this is backwards, that the JSFNY always imputes the most sinister (as well as implausible) motives to all those enemies all around her, while expecting, no demanding a free ride from the stuff that comes out of the mouths of her supporters and herself. And even though the old cries of sexism now ring hollow. Far from being penalized for her gender, the JSFNY now seems to brandish it as a Get Out of Jail Free card -- it excuses every fool thing that comes out of the mouths of the mouths of those supporters and herself.

I hadn't planned to jump into the controversy about the JSFNY's latest gaffe. Okay, it may not be the latest. I could be a gaffe or several behind. I mean the one where, claiming precedent for the continued non-resolution of the Democratic presidential nomination as we head into June, she dragged up 1992, when her husband in fact had the nomination substantially wrapped up by June, and of all years 1968, when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy waited till June to be murdered.

Once again those of us who are staggered by the tastelessness and ignorance of the reference are accused of always imputing the worst motives to the JSFNY. I've tried to come at this from every angle I can think of, and the very best explanation I can come up with is:

She just opens her mouth, and, you know, stuff comes out.

Forget the appalling suggestion that she's waiting to see if Senator Obama is perhaps assassinated too, although I don't see how it's possible to invoke the 1968 race without thinking about it.

Let's even give the JSFNY a pass on her dismissal or sheer ignorance of the expanded electoral calendar, as the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson pointed out in his column today (begun with the ominous question, "If this campaign goes on much longer, what will be left of Hillary Clinton?"):

She cites two election years, 1968 and 1992, as evidence -- but neither is relevant to 2008 because the campaign calendar has been changed.

In 1968, the Democratic race kicked off with the New Hampshire primary on March 12; when Robert Kennedy was killed, the campaign was not quite three months old. In 1992, the first contest was the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 10; by the beginning of June, candidates had been battling for about 3 1/2 months -- and it was clear that Bill Clinton would be the nominee, though he hadn't technically wrapped it up.

This year, the Iowa caucuses were held on Jan. 3, the earliest date ever. Other states scrambled to move their contests up in the calendar as well. When June arrives, the candidates will have been slogging through primaries and caucuses for five full months -- a good deal longer than in those earlier campaign cycles.

No, forget all of that. Just think about the election cycle she's dredged up. 1968.

The election cycle in which a Democratic president, four years after being elected in a historic landslide, but now unwilling to face the futility of the catastrophically wasteful, destructive, and pointless as well as increasingly unpopular war he insisted on continuing to wage, was forced to abandon his hope of being reelected, and when the Democratic Party was so hopelessly split by the war that the unspeakable Republican candidate, one Richard M. Nixon, slithered his way into the White House.

I don't think that's what the JSFNY was thinking of. The trouble is, I can no longer even hazard a guess as to what she might be thinking of.

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