Hank & Donald

Here’s a detail of David Levine's naked Kissinger — tattooed with his war crimes. I presented it to my editor, Charlotte Curtis, who killed it. Then Columbia University Press, publisher of my whistle-blowing book about The Times was afraid of putting it on my book’s cover. But I managed to convince them to make it the jacket image of the 2nd edition. (To see the full drawing, go to this site’s BOOK page.)

Watergate was more stupid than dangerous; Nixon’s Democratic rival, George McGovern, had no chance of winning that election. Nixon & Kissinger’s real crime was the secret Xmas bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, William Shawcross’s classic study, documents how the U.S. bombing campaign  undermined Cambodian neutrality and spread conflict in the region. One-third of Cambodia’s population was massacred by the fanatical Khmer Rouge, which sought to root out traces of modernity. A similar pattern created the so-called Islamic State.

In 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a Shia “crescent” emerging across the region as the new Shia majority-Iraq tilted toward Tehran.

Now, tragically, it seems that a new round of disaster is in the works as Donald Trump’s administration sides strongly with Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies against Iran, whose sway has only grown thanks to the great folly of American intervention in Iraq.

At a 2014 event marking the centennial of World War I, I finagled my way on stage to confront Hank.