HERE'S THE STORY of the night I found myself dining with Henry Kissinger. This took place at a fine Cambridge restaurant in the Charles Hotel complex near Harvard Square. Our group had just taken seats at a table near the front of the restaurant. We were studying the menu when I looked up and saw the unmistakable schlumpy figure of Kissinger shuffling by. He was with his equally recognizable wife, Nancy. And he was led to a table near the back of the dining room by another well-known personage, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. There appeared to be a security agent or two lurking around. A few minutes later, I saw Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, who is married to Power, rush in with a small piece of luggage, as if he'd just come in from the airport. He joined the Kissinger table.
What are you supposed to do when you encounter someone in a public place who you consider to be a war criminal? I was unprepared for the moment. As a journalist who is stuck, by training and temperament, in the role of the observer, I could only . . . observe. Of course it was a topic of conversation at our dinner table. One of the most notorious warmongers in the world was dining right over there. And with two of Harvard's leading liberals, two intellectuals who served in the Obama administration. Power is the author of a book about America's historical response to genocide, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Sunstein published a book that same year entitled Why Societies Need Dissent.
But in this case, none of us in the restaurant registered any dissent or displeasure. The evening proceeded in civilized decorum. It was a celebrity sighting, of the sort that is not uncommon in an upper-crust restaurant. Everyone knows how to behave. And so, as we were lingering over our desserts an hour or so later, we were able to observe the old man and his entourage make their way quietly back into the Cambridge night. It was an evening in late May of last year, four days before Kissinger (b. May 27, 1923) would turn ninety-five.
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