A Plot Thickens (re: Kissinger and Chile)

[MountainLaurel]

What a dream. So bizarre. How strange to see himself shrunken, like a pocket-size person. But there he was, Kenneth Maxwell, renowned scholar, rendered a tiny creature trembling at the windswept ramparts of his dream. Gargantuan figures loomed above, gazing down on this mere morsel.

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The dream seemed to track loosely with Maxwell's reality. He had faced some towering figures of his own. And in a paper to be published that day, Dec. 2, on a Harvard University Web site, he would criticize the credibility of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, his former employer and the grande dame of all think tanks.

Maxwell, 64, had been a senior fellow at the council for 15 years. For 11 years, he also reviewed books for Foreign Affairs, the prestigious council journal. And now he would accuse both entities of suppressing debate and silencing his voice because of pressure from Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser, secretary of state and global power broker.

Maxwell's writings indeed upset Kissinger, say Kissinger's associates. Maxwell had revisited a bitter debate, still red-hot after three decades, about Chile and Kissinger and the depth of U.S. involvement in the fall of one regime and the rise of another.

It is, at bottom, a debate about history and the battle to define it. It is about power -- its uses, its abuses. "In the foreign-policy world, history is power," says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the council. "Who is right or wrong in the past either gives or withholds power today."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56719-2005Feb26.html