Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Flattery, the One Industry Unaffected by Technology)

“The flattery industry remains old-fashioned, its work not yet disintermediated by tech. The wealthiest people can afford to surround themselves with actual bodies, who supply live flattery. Brooke Harrington writes in Capital without Borders, her study of wealth managers and their relationships with the super-rich, that some practitioners even attend their clients’ deathbeds. In flattery jobs, people skills usually trump technical competence.”— “World View” columnist Simon Kuper, “How Flattery Became a Big, Beautiful Industry,” The Financial Times, Nov. 29-30, 2025

For years, the dubious honor of being the most outrageous sycophant belonged to villainous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by Roland Young (right, with Frank Lawton as the adult title character in the 1935 film adaptation) in the attached image.

But Simon Kuper is right to focus on actual, more current examples. I had always thought, from reading Cary Reich’s marvelous 1996 biography of Nelson Rockefeller, that, in his early rise as a midlevel Washington bureaucrat, the future New York governor had perfected the art of governmental brown-nosing.

Then I found out that Rocky had his own Mini-Me, albeit with a Teutonic accent, in foreign-policy adviser Henry Kissinger, who then turned around and performed the same function for Richard Nixon.

But the true horror, as Kuper notes, lies in the current group of advisers now surrounding Donald Trump. Their sole qualification for high office is not competence but absolute shamelessness in stroking their boss’s tender ego.

More than ever this week, Trump needs his own personal Uriah Heeps in the wake of public appearances on Greenland that were so unfocused, rambling and dangerous that they sparked renewed, urgent calls for invoking the 25^th Amendment to stop his insanity.

Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson, on Notes Made by Famous Readers in Their Favorite Books)

“The task of a marginalia maven is at right angles to the task of reading a book: It is an attempt to read the reader rather than to read the writer. For several decades now, scholars have been swarming the margins of books in dead people's libraries. Those margins are among the most promising sites of ‘textual activity,’ to use the scholar's clinical phrase—a place to explore, analyze, and, it is hoped, find new raw material for the writing of dissertations. Famous readers whose libraries have fallen under such scrutiny include Melville and Montaigne, Machiavelli and Mark Twain.”— American journalist and author Andrew Ferguson, “Nixon Between the Lines,” The Atlantic, October 2023

I came upon this article several weeks ago and set it aside for future reference. Early last night, I became intrigued by Ferguson’s opening paragraphs: his discovery of Richard Nixon’s books in the late President’s library and museum in Yorba Linda, CA.

An inveterate reader, Nixon engaged heavily in these materials, becoming a counterpart to the famous authors that Ferguson mentioned as scribbling in margins. One book the disgraced ex-President digested in his unwanted retirement deeply annoyed him with its revelation that in 1969, his then-National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, had ridiculed him “in private conversation with liberal friends.”

Irony of ironies: even as Ferguson was researching his biography of Nixon among these previously unsampled books, Kissinger himself was appearing at the Nixon Library to promote his own latest book, Leadership, in which he had praised his old boss.

A further irony of ironies: only a few hours after reading about this conjunction of events, I found on the Internet that the man Ferguson called “the 20^th century’s only celebrity diplomat” had passed away, at age 100.

Somewhere in the afterlife, I suspect, Nixon and Henry the K are going to have a very long conversation.

Quote of the Day (Bob Haldeman, Behind the Scenes With Nixon in China)

“One building issue is the problem of [Secretary of State William] Rogers. He called me today to say that he was concerned about the news reports as they were building at home, which pointed out that he wasn’t involved in any of the important meetings, and was being kept out of things. He was obviously uptight about being left out of the meeting with Mao [Tse-Tung] on Monday, and made the point that if there’s any other meeting with Mao, he wants to be sure that he is included. He also was carping about the fact that [National Security Adviser] Henry [Kissinger] had two NSC people in the Chou meeting with the P [President Nixon], while there were no State Department people there. Later today, Henry charged in, furious, because he’d learned that Rogers had raised, with the foreign minister, the question of their participating in writing the communique, and the Foreign Minister had said no, that Prime Minister Chou [En-lai] had assigned it to Dr. Kissinger, and Mr. Chiao. So it put Rogers in a rather embarrassing position. This is a problem that’s going to continue, I think, on a similar basis.”—H.R. Haldeman, diary entry for February 23, 1972, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1993)

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain James T. Kirk is given the unenviable task of escorting an ambassador from his implacable enemies, the Klingons, on a peace mission to the Federation. When he asks why he’s been chosen for this unlikely assignment, Mr. Spock tells his friend, the space-age cold warrior, of “an old Vulcan proverb”: “It took Nixon to go to China.”

Forty years after the 37^th President’s extraordinary week in Red China, “Nixon going to China” is shorthand for a rapprochement with a foe that only the hardest of hard-liners can conclude. After that event, it seemed, anything was possible.

The images of Richard Nixon with Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the very symbol of world Communism on the march, gave a tremendous boost to the President in the year of his re-election effort. (Four months later, the Watergate burglary occurred, giving a double meaning to the Chinese astrological cycle designation for 1972: “The Year of the Rat.”) Over the long term, the move was part of a four-corner diplomatic maneuver in which Nixon sought to move China to nudge North Vietnam toward a more favorable negotiating position at the Paris peace talks, and to use China in turn to prod the Soviet Union toward better relations (including the first SALT treaty).

But, as the passage above from the diaries of Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman indicates, the week also brought to the fore a trend occurring within the U.S. delegation: the growing chasm between the State Department and the upstart agency, the National Security Council. Assuredly, prior Secretaries of State had not always seen eye to eye with the men (and they were all men back then) heading this new agency created by National Security Act of 1947. But no other NSC head before Henry Kissinger had sought so relentlessly to cut the President’s senior Cabinet member out of the all-important information loop.

Kissinger found a willing ear in Nixon, who had views of foreign policy strong enough that he wouldn’t have minded acting as his own Secretary of State. Since he couldn’t do that, Nixon appointed to the office a longtime friend who happened to be inexperienced in foreign policy: William Rogers. The latter has often been characterized by historians as weak, but the Haldeman diary entry here demonstrates that even Rogers had his limits: he was not going to be humiliated in front of the media during the most important foreign-policy initiative by the President.

Nixon didn’t think much of several units within the State Department. The Latin American division, he felt, was a “disaster area,” and, his investigation as a congressman of Alger Hiss could not have inspired confidence. Above all, he noted, in a top-secret discussion with Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai (pictured here with the President), the State Department had been given only the most sanitized version of the 500-page summary of Kissinger’s secret July 1971 talks with Chinese officials because the department “leaked like a sieve.“

Not long after the election, Haldeman was deputized with urging Rogers to hand in his resignation. The news rankled the Secretary of State, who 20 years before had helped Nixon survive his “slush fund” scandal by urging him to address the nation on TV in the “Checkers” speech. But Nixon and Haldeman ended by doing Rogers a favor: he wasn’t around to be consumed by the growing Watergate scandal that burst on the administration the following spring.

State Department-NSC tensions hardly ended with Rogers’ resignation (and Kissinger’s assumption of both posts). Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski had worked together before they joined the Carter Administration, but they quickly fell out over policy differences. The pattern repeated itself in the Reagan Administration, with first Alexander Haig bickering with Richard Allen, then George Schultz watching angrily as Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter did the President’s bidding in fomenting the Iran-contra mess. It is very likely that some President in the not-so-distant future will create another mess involving two governmental units out to defend their foreign-policy prerogatives.