Lewis H. Lapham’s correspondence with Henry Kissinger can be read here.
Lewis H. Lapham wanted to be remembered as a literary man and an essayist, and no one should begrudge his lofty ambition to be compared with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, the brilliant French chronicler of nineteenth-century class, money, and status in a society torn between its revolutionary heritage and its desire for royalty and aristocratic privilege. Lewis never published a novel (though he did have a youthful attempt in the drawer), but he probably got closer than any writer of his generation to piercing the mysteries of the analogous American paradox: a republic born of violent revolution that hasn’t yet shed its wish for kings.
Lewis was also a courageous and often radical journalist who guided others, and when I think of his twenty-eight years as editor of Harper’s Magazine (because of his two separate tenures, he jokingly called himself the Grover Cleveland of American editors), I place him in the ranks of the finest twentieth-century reporters and opinion writers, alongside H. L. Mencken, I. F. Stone, A. J. Liebling, and Walter Karp. It was his boldness that drew me to him, at a young age; it was his radicalism that illuminated the editorial project that we launched at Harper’s—literary though it is and will remain.
Despite his instinctive belligerence toward illegitimate power, Lewis was sometimes caricatured as a renegade against his patrician upbringing—as if he were posing as a rebel without ever renouncing his elitist roots. But this was an oversimplification and a misunderstanding of the man I knew. To be sure, he maintained and defended certain accessories of high Wasp culture, but a focus on these accoutrements distracts from the substance of his best work. Iconoclastic, skeptical, and contrarian were other descriptions of Lewis that, while also true, had the ring of superficiality—of being unorthodox just for the hell of it. The Lewis I talked with day in and day out burned with anger at what he viewed as the ongoing betrayal of the founding promises of the Republic, particularly concerning freedom of speech and thought, self-government, and a foreign policy tilted toward enlightened and sensible restraint. He took George Washington’s and John Quincy Adams’s anti-imperialist admonitions to heart; he spoke passionately about the devotion to free expression of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as if he’d known them personally; he evinced a direct connection to Mark Twain’s ironic liberalism and anti-imperialism that could make it seem like he’d just come from a drink with him at a bar near our New York office, on the corner of Broadway and Bond Street.
In its largely admiring obituary, the Washington Post attributed editorial “blunders” to Lewis, most notably his refusal to
excerpt All the President’s Men, the soon-to-be bestseller by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about the Watergate break-in that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.
The Post attributed this decision (Lewis was then still the managing editor of Harper’s and could have been overruled by Robert Shnayerson, the editor) to his objection to “the book’s many unnamed sources.” A commercial blunder, perhaps. But Lewis had a certain contempt for not-for-attribution journalism—he favored what he called “investigative reading”—in part because he suspected corrupt collusion between self-interested, anonymous sources and journalists with axes to grind. Anyway, by late 1974, when the Woodward–Bernstein book was published, everyone knew the Watergate story chapter and verse, and Nixon had been safely packed away down the memory hole. His villainous and murderous legacy, however, was alive and well in the person of Henry Kissinger, whose malign and cynical influence on American foreign policy never really ebbed after Nixon left office.
It was much more daring and newsworthy for Lewis to publish, as the cover story of the May 1979 issue, an excerpt from William Shawcross’s deeply reported exposé of Nixon and Kissinger’s Cambodia policy, which Shawcross convincingly argued had led to the murder of some two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. With due respect to Seymour Hersh’s and Christopher Hitchens’s later work on the subject, Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia remains the best portrait of Kissinger at his worst. And Kissinger evidently knew it, which seems to be why he launched a charm offensive against Lewis rather than a counterattack.
Kissinger was due to publish the first volume of his memoirs that October and needed to prepare the ground for its critical reception. In June 1979, Lewis and Kissinger met for lunch, and for more than a year afterward there was nothing in their correspondence to suggest that Kissinger had been insulted by the previous month’s publication of dr. kissinger goes to war, the headline of the Harper’s excerpt from Sideshow. Kissinger was well known for seducing journalists with flattery, access, and scoops, never losing his composure when something in the press displeased him. So, as was his tendency, Kissinger asked Lewis to send him, as Lewis put it in a July 30 letter, “the essays in which you expressed an interest.” But the enclosed essays included an unexpected barb. On December 17, after Kissinger finally got around to reading them, the self-styled twentieth-century Metternich replied with studied ambivalence:
You have the unusual ability to write articles which I read with enormous approval until you manage to get in an ad hominem dig at me. Which is all the more disconcerting as when I read an article I consider myself on the side that you are praising. Be that as it may I will have my secretary call your office for breakfast.
Despite the demotion from lunch to breakfast, Lewis maintained a civil dialogue with Kissinger, even dining with him and his wife, Nancy, in early February 1980. On July 11 of that year, he thanked Kissinger for his “support” for what was, in fact, my successful effort to “rescue Harper’s Magazine from oblivion” after it was closed by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company, the magazine’s former owner. But Lewis never forgot his obligation as an editor or his hostility toward the American ruling class. On September 23, following the establishment of the non-profit Harper’s Magazine Foundation, he sent Kissinger the galleys of a forthcoming Harper’s review of Kissinger’s memoir White House Years, along with a letter that contained surprising news:
You will notice that it is an extended review . . . written by William Shawcross, a critic about whom you have expressed feelings of revulsion and distrust. Mr. Shawcross worked on the review for the better part of a year, and Harper’s Magazine has been at some pains to verify the accuracy of his quotations and chronologies. Even so, I expect that you will find his argument distasteful, and you may want to respond to it at considered length.
Kissinger’s campaign of seduction had failed—indeed, it had backfired—and he dropped the veil of diplomacy. His October 10 reply, headlined not for publication, declined the invitation to contradict or correct Shawcross in public. Within the safe confines of a private letter, Kissinger allowed himself certain fatuous remarks about the “vicious critics” of his and Nixon’s Vietnam policy and, of all things, their alleged role in prolonging the war. Then, rather strangely, this: “But while I consider Shawcross’s argumentation mendacious and misleading, I have always granted the good faith and essentially moral underpinning of the antiwar movement.” As for Lewis, Kissinger had lost patience:
I have had high regard for your views, painful as they have occasionally been, and I have given tangible proof of that respect. Our meetings had a significance for me because of my belief that if our society is to restore itself there must be the possibility of a serious dialogue between philosophical opponents and a modicum of mutual respect. To publish an article culminating in a charge of war crimes goes beyond the limits of decency. To pretend that a national tragedy was a personal villainy is a form of escapism and moral abdication. You cannot escape your responsibility for publishing a charge so offensive and dishonorable against someone you had no hesitation to use when it served your purposes.
As I read this for the first time, just a week after Lewis’s death, I felt that there could be no higher praise for him as a journalist and editor; it reconfirmed that I made the right decision in restoring him to the editor’s chair in 1983. Lewis was the ally whom I wanted, whom I needed, to preserve and prolong the Harper’s legacy; his is the inspiration I still draw on as the magazine enters its 175th year. As I consider Kissinger’s breathtaking hypocrisy, I think of the task ahead: exposing, explicating, and contradicting in these pages the contemporary disciples of his treacherous and duplicitous methods.
Lewis, by the way, had the last word. In a letter dated November 24, 1980, he reminded Kissinger of
Machiavelli’s distinction between the morality of the city and the morality of the soul. As a National Security Advisor or Secretary of State you have no choice but to make decisions, many of them undoubtedly ambiguous or unpleasant, according to the morality of the city, but then you ask to be judged according to the morality of the soul. How then could I, or anyone else, possibly satisfy you?
I could ask the same question with regard to your intercession in the matter of Harper’s Magazine. I asked for your testimony not on my own behalf but rather on behalf of a magazine obliged to publish free and independent opinions, some of them unpleasant. Given my responsibility as the editor of Harper’s, I cannot use the magazine to flatter my own political advantage. What you were asked to rescue was not Lewis Lapham’s career but a forum in which people like Mr. Shawcross could say what they think about the events that shape their lives.
I can only hope that many more contemporary readers will find it in themselves to support this forum—this temple of free thought and inquiry—in the same spirit.
In the years following his duel with Kissinger, Lewis performed numerous acts of journalistic defiance with my full support. Two stand out: his profile and endorsement, in 2000, of Ralph Nader’s independent presidential campaign, and his early opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous and mendacious invasion of Iraq.
Lewis’s essay opposing the invasion appeared in the October 2002 issue, more than five months before it occurred. Once again, he flouted political convention and family ties when it would have been so much easier to go along with the crowd. Born like Lewis to Wasp privilege and educated at Yale, Bush was as worthy and as villainous a target for Lewis as was Kissinger.
Nader, born to Lebanese immigrants of modest means, deserved admiration and a proper hearing for both his principles and his concrete actions to safeguard the much-sullied (by Bill Clinton and so many other smooth talkers) American dream. For Lewis, Nader was the exemplar of a complete American devoted to the best interests of his country.
In both instances, Lewis was on the “wrong” side of history—Nader was widely denounced and discredited by Democrats, liberals, and the media as nothing more than a spoiler. Bush’s war, on the other hand, enjoyed the support of a grotesque coalition of Democrats, neoconservatives, and the foreign-policy and liberal media establishments. But through it all, Lewis was on the right side of wisdom—and of the U.S. Constitution. He detested pseudo-constitutional piety in politicians and other journalists, especially when they spouted clichés in defense of “American values.” The First Amendment, Lewis used to say, wasn’t conceived to help in the writing of sermons about liberty—it was created to be used. Thank God he knew how to use it.
