HENRY KISSINGER LIED ABOUT ME

Henry Kissinger died yesterday at the age of 100. If you want to know why Kissinger was hated by so many people, read Spencer Ackerman's comprehensive and merciless Rolling Stone obituary, "Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies" (paywalled, but you should be able to read it if you open it in a private or incognito window).

I can't add much to that piece. Kissinger was a monster, and the world is a better place without him. What I can tell you is that he could be a bad person in small as well as large ways. You should focus on the outsize acts of evil for which he was responsible, but in addition to those, the bastard once publicly lied about me and my work colleagues, inventing a work error on our part to avoid taking responsibility for a scholarly error of his own.

In the early 1990s I was working at Simon & Schuster, and I oversaw the copyediting and proofreading of a Kissinger book titled Diplomacy. Ernest R. May, a Harvard historian, wrote about the book in The New York Times Book Review. May noted some sloppy scholarship on Kissinger's part:

"Diplomacy" makes the types of mistakes for which students fail to get pass degrees in history.... it describes the Hossbach memorandum of November 1937 as recording Hitler's avowal of plans for wars of conquest before "an assemblage of almost all of Germany's general officers."

In fact,

... the Hossbach memorandum ... recorded a meeting involving only seven people: Hitler himself, Col. Friedrich Hossbach (who took the notes), the foreign minister, the war minister and the commanders in chief of the army, air force and navy. Not even the chief of staff of the army was officially informed. These facts are doubly significant because many German generals later denied knowing Hitler's intentions. Their protestations smoothed Germany's cold-war rearmament. While scholarly research has since established that many generals actually knew more than they admitted, Mr. Kissinger's mistaken description of the Hossbach memorandum blurs understanding not only of the Third Reich but also of the German Federal Republic.

Kissinger fired off a long letter to the Book Review taking issue with this and other aspects of May's piece; it was published three weeks later. On the subject of the Hossbach memorandum, Kissinger threw low-level Simon & Schuster workers -- my colleagues and me -- under the bus:

Professor May correctly points out that the phrase that Hitler revealed his plans to "almost all of Germany's general officers" is inaccurate. In fact -- as my own research showed -- only top general officers representing the German High Command were present. In the final stages of copy-editing, the word "top" was inadvertently dropped from before "general officers."

That was a lie.

Kissinger's original manuscript didn't include the word "top" in this sentence, and he never added it, despite having more than one opportunity to do so. I made photocopies of these documents -- the work at the time was all done on paper -- and I still have them. Here's that sentence in Kissinger's manuscript, with the copy editor's handwritten changes:

Here's the sentence in the first round of proofs, in which Kissinger's changes were entered by hand. He didn't add the word "top."

Nor did he add "top" in the second round of page proofs, which he also reviewed:

Kissinger's lie about this is a tiny immorality compared to the monstrous deeds he's known for. But it's the pure pettiness that offends me three decades later. Diplomacy was a 912-page book. Kissinger could have acknowledged his own mistake -- errors are inevitable in a work of that length. But his ego wouldn't allow him to do that, so he blamed the help.