A luncheon with Henry Kissinger
It was the early 1980s when I was a somewhat naïve, ready-to-believe graduate at Columbia University, thoroughly taken up by New York’s atmosphere and its smells, streets, and cosmopolitan culture. All this and more came together at the International House (IH), where a lot of us from across the world had a strange but definite bond in a stranger place we called home, right next to Sakura Park. The Americans themselves had a culture shock with us and our strange customs and ideas.
Peru meant a small overconfident guy; Gary from Oregon, a very serious guy but was also a joker; Anna told us about potato growing in Bolivia and about her schoolmates being former Nazi officers’ children. I was at home with this assorted, intelligent, talented group ready to participate in the Night of Nations. It was a one-night celebration showcasing all nations. Apart from this, there were serious lectures given by Columbia and Harvard professors, creativity- and artist-oriented exhibitions, and talks in a room with a beautiful Charles Pendergrast painting.
Mr Henry Kissinger, who was on the IH board, invited about 13 of us Fellows to his plush residence in New York for a luncheon. I was one of the few women present and was thrilled that this vibrant gentleman and his dominant personality, not to mention the famous thick accent and thicker glasses, complimented me on my mustard Mysore silk saree, calling it a dress! I thought to myself, perhaps he might have said the same to Mrs Indira Gandhi, which could have annoyed her no end.
At that time, Kissinger was not as badly perceived by the ‘South’ as he is now. That was in the 80s. But since then, his Machiavellian strategies have been exposed.
Later I read Willian Shawcross’ Sideshow, where he writes of Kissinger getting the US to carpet bomb Cambodia while sitting for peace talks with Le Duc Tho and about him being a wily foreign policy strategist, calculated and unethical, among other blunders laid at his door. Now, four decades later, as a retired professor of political science, I would have liked to ask him as to how he made his ruthless decisions where the rest of the world was concerned. He was truly an American nationalist with a stubbornly insular American foreign policy agenda. Many questions arise from this.
At the point I met him, it was meeting the US Secretary of State. It was meeting a very famous American and definitely a global figure. Thinking back, the luncheon at that time held historic significance for me.