DON’T BE LIKE HENRY
Here’s something Henry Kissinger is more upset over than last week’s cover of THE WEEKLY STANDARD: a new TV movie about his negotiations with the North Vietn amese in 1972. Kissinger and Nixon, which airs Sunday, December 10, on TNT, offers a rare depiction of the then-national security adviser losing sight of t he interests of the South Vietnamese as he grows more insistent on making a dea l with Le Duc Tho. The movie, a sophisticated piece of political theater, has o utraged Kissinger; in a letter to TV Guide, he decries the movie’s portraya l of “a reptilian Kissinger [conning] a boozing, anti-Semitic Nixon into peac e talks with Hanoi.” Kissinger has a point about Beau Bridges’s irresponsible p ortrayal of Nixon; the depiction of him here is false and repugnant. But writer Lionel Chetwynd does Kissinger full I justice as a brilliant negotiator, player , and thinker concerned about the loss of American lives as well as demonstrati ng his well-documented ability to manipulate the press and take his negotiation s farther than his boss wanted. “The film brazenly reverses history,” Kissinger writes. No, it doesn’t. Chetwynd is careful to avoid the charge that Kissinger was seeking a “decent interval” before the North Vietnamese would sweep in and subsume the South. He just portrays the Paris Peace Accords as a disaster, and they were.
