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**DECEMBER 5, 2023**

On the Prospect website

Actually, Opioid Victims Love the Sackler Immunity Shields

And other fake news from the Supreme Court's Purdue Pharma hearing BY
MAUREEN TKACIK

How Monopolies and Maps Are Killing 'Internet for All'

The $65 million moon shot to bring every American affordable broadband
is failing low-income communities of color. BY SEAN GONSALVES

Buy and Displace

Across Los Angeles, corporate landlords and even RV owners work hard to
raise rents. BY ROBIN KAISER-SCHATZLEIN

The Department of Justice's Legal Love Letter to Moderna

The DOJ's Civil Division is supposed to work for people and in the
public interest. So why does it seem to care more about Moderna's
liability than its own taxpayers? BY ANANYA KALAHASTI

Meyerson on TAP

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**** My Hour With Henry Kissinger

Opining against morality in foreign policy in 1989, he did nothing to
diminish his blood-drenched image.

One day in the autumn of 1989, a couple of months before the fall of the
Berlin Wall, my friend Kelly Candaele and I went to Midtown Manhattan to
film an interview with Henry Kissinger. Kelly was an accomplished
documentary filmmaker; his film on women's professional baseball in
the 1940s-his mother had been a star-was the basis for the picture

**A League of Their Own**. He was then producing and directing a
documentary on the life of Olof Palme, the
socialist leader who twice had been Sweden's prime minister before his
assassination in 1986. (I was writing the narration, which, to our
astonishment, was read by Paul Newman, who, like Palme, was a graduate
of Kenyon College in Ohio.)

Kelly had conducted interviews with Palme's friends, allies, and key
figures in his life, such as former German chancellor Willy Brandt and
DSA founder Michael Harrington, and gotten archival footage of many of
them, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, extolling Palme's legacies.
He'd also obtained footage of, and conducted interviews with,
Palme's critics, all but one of them Swedish conservatives. Palme's
best-known conservative critics, however, weren't Swedish. They were
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

In 1968, when he was heir apparent to Swedish Prime Minister Tage
Erlander, Palme had joined a Stockholm demonstration against the Vietnam
War. (In the same year, he pointed out, he also had spoken at a larger
demonstration against the Soviets' invasion of Czechoslovakia.) In
1972, then prime minister, he'd led a demonstration protesting
Nixon's Christmastime carpet bombing of Hanoi. Nixon and Kissinger
reacted by expelling, albeit temporarily, Sweden's ambassador to the
U.S., and making very clear that Palme was no friend of the United
States-at least, of

**their**United States.

But Kissinger had clearly welcomed talking with Palme when they were
both out of office, and he agreed to meet with us in his office to talk
about Palme-which meant, about foreign policy. As the very nature of
the project made clear we were both on the left, and as he, and hardly
anyone else, had ever heard of us, we were surprised by his assent. We
figured-and still figure-that he thought such an interview might be
seen as a token gesture to liberals, who, after all, write most of the
histories.

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There was nothing remotely liberal, however, in what Kissinger said that
day. Palme's insistence on public policy rooted in basic morality
obviously still irked him. "It's very easy to be moralistic at a great
distance in an area where Sweden had no direct interest," he said. "A
Swedish prime minister can afford to be a gadfly. If Palme had been
prime minister of a country of 100 million [citizens], possessing
nuclear weapons and being a key element of the international structure,
he couldn't have played the role of a gadfly to that extent."

In his own interview with Kelly, Willy Brandt said that Kissinger had
expressed to him his exasperation with Palme, and that Brandt had
reminded him that Palme had gone to college in (and then hitchhiked
around) America. That only triggered Kissinger's broader exasperation
with American idealism. "Going to an American university," he told us,
"he of course absorbed with relish the American nostalgia that foreign
policy has to be conducted entirely on abstract, theoretical, and,
maybe, moral and philosophical grounds. And that's not what a student
of history would conclude about how foreign policy has in fact been
conducted."

It's how Palme conducted his foreign policy, however, which is why he
became the first Western European head of government to oppose the
Vietnam War, and the first Western head of government to provide
assistance to the African National Congress as it sought to overturn
South African apartheid-all the while also fiercely opposing the
USSR's occupation and suppression of Eastern Europe. (There is still
some suspicion that Palme's murder, which has never been solved, was
the work of apartheid South Africa's agents.) Palme also propounded
the idea that the U.S. and USSR were more endangered by the sheer number
of their nuclear weapons than by either attacking the other, and
mobilized both U.S. and Soviet diplomats to embrace this perspective,
which helped lead to the START treaties that reduced the number of nukes
each nation possessed.

Some gadfly.

Kissinger did want us to understand that he admired Palme's
intellect-his "extraordinary culture, extraordinary intelligence, high
analytical ability and great knowledge. He was fun to talk to, whether
you agreed with him or not."

For the purposes of Kelly's film, it was a very good interview.
Whatever Kissinger's purposes may have been, it did nothing to dispel
his reputation as the grim reaper of Vietnam, Chile, and Cambodia.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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