STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

The Once Honorable Leslie H. Gelb,  President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR]; Senior Correspondent for the N Y Times; and a Ubiquitous Board Member: Appears on Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails, Kowtowing to Her!

On this July 4^th weekend when we celebrate the deeds of those who fought for the independence of this great nation, I want to honor a man whom I had admired and was a very special person in my life—Dr. Leslie Gelb.

When I first met him decades ago, he was a senior official in the Carter Administration which was filled with all types of forthright men and women who were willing to stand up for their personal and professional beliefs—including President Jimmy Carter. From that period in my life, one person stood out in my mind-- Leslie Gelb. During this time, he had refused to acquiesce to Zbig Brezenski and resigned. I found that act very impressive. Soon Cyrus Vance and I were to resign afterwards over the issue of the Iran Hostages.

I found that Les was an honorable man who stated his convictions; stood by them; and then acted accordingly. His subsequent career became an admirable trajectory, where Les became a senior correspondent for the NY Times [even a senior editor];  and eventually attained the then much-vaunted position of President of the Council On Foreign Relations. At the CFR, where I attended few meetings, I had the rare pleasure of talking to him and renewing old acquaintances.

Subsequently,  I resigned from the CFR, after having realized how toxic they had become from an inherent inertia of creativity; alongside the perseveration of old thoughts and self-aggrandizing mantras.

Then, I happened to read a letter by Leslie H . Gelb where he apologized to whomever for having used his august position at the CFR and in Washington society to take a cowardly stance on the Iraq War. He urged our brave American Warriors to enter distant conflicts which Les knew from his past experiences[as a senior official at DOD having  overseen the production of the Pentagon Papers] that our warriors would die needlessly; as would, thousands of innocent civilians.

This is the letter Les wrote for future posterity:

“My initial support of the Iraq War was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain professional and political credibility.”  No truer words were spoken from a man who eventually succumbed to such unfortunate tendencies.

Now we can’t really say that he owned up to his own miscreant behavior. Yet we can say that he became a man who pandered to the whims and ways of an amorphous  community of neocons and idiots who had never fought in a war [neither did Les]. However, I would have given Les a pass and written off his cowardly behavior as an insecure Jew who needed the approval of the WASP and military community in order to be heard and accepted.

A king of inferiority complex.

No problem there!

Yet flash forward to current headlines, what do I find in today’s Wall Street Journal article regarding the missing Hillary Clinton emails?

Let me quote directly from the email:
“A loyal supporter and Democratic activist, Lynn Forester de Rothschild wrote Mrs. Clinton that she has spent the day on Nantucket with Leslie Gelb, a former State Department and Pentagon hand who wanted to write a Parade Magazine piece about the Secretary, detailing her daily life and the impact she is having on national affairs..

“He said he would give you a veto over content and looked me in the eye and said, “SHE WILL LIKE IT.” Ms De Rothschild wrote. The resulting [Gelb] piece was INDEED QUITE POSITIVE.

Mr Gelb wrote that diners in the State Department cafeteria burst into applause upon seeing her and concluded that she is “absolutely determined to make her tenure as Secretary of State a success and to accomplish important things.”

As usual, Les was wrong in this puff piece on Hillary.

As most of you know by now, Libya, Benghazi and the 100 plus nations she had visited amounted to a complete disaster as Sec State. However, my concern is not with HC. She is at least a well-known entity to Americans.

The reason I wrote this blog is to show you how it is the ‘good, decent men’ of our nation who hide in the shadows of the Pentagon and State Department; as well as the countless Think Tanks camouflaging as ‘neutral analysts’ –who send us into the wars in Korea; Vietnam; Iraq; Afghanistan; et. al. Leslie Gelb is an Honorable Man who has shown himself to be a “panderer to the rich and famous”; and a sycophant of those he serves.

I might remind you, all, that Les won the ‘Famous Father Of The Year’ in 1999. How ashamed I would have been of my father had he hid behind the skirts of women and men in order solicit favors from them in return for a flattering portrait in the shlock propaganda magazine—Parade.

What we have here is simply frailty of mankind. Neither malicious nor nefarious; just too frightened to assert his true beliefs lest he lose his job and reputation as ‘one of the boys’. How often have I heard those rationalizations in the Nazi prisoners whom I had seen as a child in the French Displaced Persons Camp—‘I was just doing my duty!”

It did not stop there! The Soviet Communist System also offered me a panoply of excuses and reasons for the retention of that corrupted system.

However, the 9/11 Stand Down and the consequent outcry of silence by those in the know—the Foreign Affairs Community – was simply deafening.

Now, Les is offered by me as the Personae of the Year 2015, as an American in his twilight years who becomes most cowardly and disgustingly ingratiating to the rich and famous. I give Leslie Gelb as the model of what has happened to our Honorable Men ----they have descended into perfidious insolence and dastardly deeds for which they still refuse to assume personal responsibility and attribute them to outside forces beyond their control.

Let me end with a quote from a famous French novelist, Honore de Balzac:

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by PYGMIES!!”