Henry Kissinger wanted to invest in Clearview.AI, the facial recognition company.
He called up Hoan Ton-That, who cofounded Clearview.AI with me, and asked to invest.
I advised against taking Kissinger’s money — who wants to be associated with the guy who invested in Theranos anyway? — but I’m still not totally convinced that that was the right decision. The official story is that Elizabeth Holmes duped Kissinger but there are still plenty of unanswered questions about Holmes and her connections to foreign intelligence.
Thinking it through now, I think I should probably have said “yes” to a Kissinger investment.
After all, Kissinger got largely what he wanted and maybe it was best to just give him what he wanted. So many others did. Why not me?
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Kissinger was critically important for reducing the know how of a certain generations of State Department types.
For all of his complaints about Israeli behavior, he saw them as the way into the Middle East. And while there may well have been efforts to assassinate him — I find this hard to believe but whatever — he more or less gave the Israelis whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.
Kissinger’s deference to Israeli misbehavior was only exceeded by his sycophancy to the Chinese and the Russians who put him on the payroll. It’s rude to ask what they got for their money but Kissinger did advise Ukraine to give up territory to Russia so it’s fair to make some guesses. Naturally Kissinger pretended to advise Jared Kushner and Vladimir Putin alike.
Power may have been an aphrodisiac but middle-manning paid the bills.
All roads had to run through him and he would leak, destroy, distort anything he could to put himself at the center of all communications.
I admire Kissinger for building a private empire from essentially nothing. He was a creation of the Rockefellers & his mind and his own pluck.
Nelson Rockefeller set him up — it was a sort of deal between Nixon and Rockefeller — and he took it from there. Who knows what you can do with a little Jewish moxie. Good for Henry. Bad for America. But isn’t this how it always is?
There is a strange love between the Jews who wished they were WASPs & the WASPs who wish to be Jews. Wrong on much but the Kissinger wasn’t paid to be right. He was paid for his Rolodex and his charm. And yes, that Rolodex included dictators, mobsters, and starlets all of whom he was happy to jump into bed with.
Yes, all these efforts to portray Kissinger as a kind of statesman fail upon closer inspection.
Here’s Henry Kissinger with the mobbed-up Lew Wasserman (mobster Sidney Korshak was his right-hand man) at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on May 11, 1977.
A year before the Iranian Revolution started? Which “Reagan” fixed? Did I mention that Elizabeth Holmes’s relative was ambassador to Iran?
Next you’ll tell me all about Henry Salvatori, the poor little Italian boy who got involved with the oil industry.
He wasn’t a statesman nor was he a villain. He was just another wannabe — just another pretender.