Beyond Mrs. Graham's domain, any story that put Kissinger in a negative light could expect to get a cold shoulder from many influential media figures who burnished their credentials as Washington insiders by boasting of their access to the great and powerful Kissinger.
So, even a year ago, in November 2008, when the Lyndon Johnson presidential library released audiotapes of Johnson discussing what he called Nixon's "treason," the remarkable disclosure received only passing notice from America's major newspapers, which published a short Associated Press wire story about Johnson's complaint without offering context or details.
The studied indifference by Washington's political and journalistic elites may have reflected the same attitude that was expressed in 1968 by a pillar of the Establishment, then-Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, who joined Secretary of State Dean Rusk in urging Johnson not to go public with his evidence of Republican treachery.
"Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I'm wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected," Clifford said in a Nov. 4, 1968, conference call. "It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country's interests."
Clifford's remark came in the context of Johnson learning that Christian Science Monitor reporter Saville Davis was working on a story about how Nixon's entourage had undermined the peace talks by sending its own messages to South Vietnamese officials.
Instead of helping Davis confirm his information, Clifford and Rusk urged Johnson to make no comment, advice that Johnson accepted. He maintained his public silence and went into retirement embittered over Nixon's peace-talk sabotage, which had denied Johnson a chance to end the war. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Significance of Nixon's Treason."]
Not in 1983, after Hersh pulled back the curtain on the 1968 peace-talk gambit, nor at any other time, has there been a formal U.S. government investigation regarding Nixon's "treason."
And with the Vietnam gambit still unknown in 1980, some of the same figures, including Henry Kissinger, had no reason not to reprise their success by disrupting another Democratic President as he tried to navigate the United States past another foreign policy mess, the rise of an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran after the U.S.-back Shah of Iran was forced into exile.
The Story Begins
Arguably, that troubling story began on the afternoon of March 23, 1979, when Kissinger's longtime mentor, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, and his aide Joseph Verner Reed entered a town house in the exclusive Beekham Place neighborhood on Manhattan's East Side. They met a small, intense and deeply worried woman whose life had been turned upside down.
The woman, Iran's Princess Ashraf, the Shah's strong-willed twin sister, had gone from wielding immense behind-the-scenes clout in the ancient nation of Persia to living in exile -- albeit a luxurious one. With hostile Islamic fundamentalists running her homeland, Ashraf also was troubled by the plight of her ailing brother who had fled into exile, first to Egypt and then Morocco.
Now, she was turning for help to the man who ran one of the leading U.S. banks, one which had made a fortune serving as the Shah's banker for a quarter century and handling billions of dollars in Iran's assets. Ashraf's message was straightforward. She wanted Rockefeller to intercede with Jimmy Carter and ask the President to relent on his decision against granting the Shah refuge in the United States.
A distressed Ashraf said her brother had been given a one-week deadline to leave his current place of refuge, Morocco. "My brother has nowhere to go," Ashraf pleaded, "and no one else to turn to." [See David Rockefeller, Memoirs]
Carter had been resisting appeals to let the Shah enter the United States, fearing that admitting him would endanger the personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. In mid-February 1979, Iranian radicals had overrun the embassy and briefly held the staff hostage before the Iranian government intervened to secure release of the Americans.
Carter feared a repeat of the crisis. Already the United States was deeply unpopular with the Islamic revolution because of the CIA's history of meddling in Iranian affairs. The U.S. spy agency had helped organize the overthrow of an elected nationalist government in 1953 and the restoration of the Shah and the Pahlavi family to the Peacock Throne.
In the quarter century that followed, the Shah kept his opponents at bay through the coercive powers of his secret police, known as the SAVAK.
As the Islamic Revolution gained strength in January 1979, however, the Shah's security forces could no longer keep order. The Shah -- suffering from terminal cancer -- scooped up a small pile of Iranian soil, boarded his jet, sat down at the controls and flew the plane out of Iran to Egypt.
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