I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.
Then, there was Cary Grant. He spent three hours a week in hospitals teaching nervous people how to eat jello.
I was the one in charge of the kids growing up.
Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.
My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.
In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.
I was with - he wasn't the president then, but - Barack Obama, when he was running, in Washington, during Black Congressional Caucus Weekend, and did a panel about global warming with him. It was almost as if I switched careers for a while, and became a political activist.
As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.
I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.