ping pong team to visit Peking became a part of the preparation for Kissinger's China
card. Mainly Bush came on as an ultra-orthodox Nixon loyalist. Was he a liberal
conservative?, asked a reporter. "People in Texas used to ask me that in the campaigns,"
replied Bush. "Some even called me a right-wing reactionary. I like to think of myself as
a pragmatist, but I have learned to defy being labelled...What I can say is that I am a
strong supporter of the President. If you can tell me what he is, I can tell you what I am."
Barbara liked the Waldorf suite, and the enthusiastic host and hostess soon laid on a
demanding schedule of recepetions, dinners, and entertainments.
Soon after taking up his UN posting, Bush received a phone calle from Assistant
Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Joseph Sisco, one of Kissinger's principal
henchmen. Sisco had been angered by some comments Bush had made about the Middle
East situation in a press conference after presenting his credentials. Despite the fact that
Bush, as a cabinet officer, ranked several levels above Sisco, Sisco was in effect the voice
of Kissinger. Sisco told Bush that it was Sisco who spoke for the United States
government on the Middle East, and that he would do both the on-the-record talking and
the leaking about that area. Bush knunckled under, for these were the realities of the
Kissinger years.
Henry Kissinger was now Bush's boss even more than Nixon was, and later, as the
Watergate scandal progressed into 1973, the dominion of Kissinger would become even
more absolute. During these years Bush, serving his apprenticeship in diplomacy and
world strategy under Kissinger, became a virtual Kissinger clone in two senses. First, to a
significant degree, Kissinger's networks and connections merged together with Bush's
own, foreshadowing a 1989 administration in which the NSC director and the number
two man in the State Department were both Kissinger's business partners from his
consulting and influence-peddling firm, Kissinger associates. Secondly, Bush assimilated
Kissinger's characteristic British-style geopolitical mentality and approach to problems,
and this is now the epistemology that dictates Bush's own dealing with the main
questions of world politics.
The Kissinger networks in question can be summed up here under four headings.
Kissinger was at once British imperialist, Zionist, Soviet, and Red Chinese in his
orientation, all wrapped up in a parcel of greed, megalomania, and perversion. [fn 9]
Kissinger was one of the few persons in the world who still had anything to teach George
Bush in any of these categories.
The most essential level of Kissinger was the British one. This meant that US foreign
policy was to be guided by British imperial geoplitics, in particular the notion of the
balance of power: the United States must always ally with the second strongest land
power in the world (Red China) against the strongest land power (the USSR) in order to
preserve the balance of power. This was expressed in the 1971 -72 Nixon-Kissinger
opening to Peking, to which Bush would contribute from his UN post. The balance of
power, since it rules out a positive engagement for the economic progress of the
international community as a whole, has always been a recipe for new wars. Kissinger