My Life with Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger became National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon in January 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam War. In March, the two of them launched an illegal bombing campaign against Cambodia with the idea of wiping out Viet Cong forces, a campaign that ultimately led to the Cambodian genocide.

     In July 1969, with donated books and little capital, a group of anti-war activist graduate students at Washington University opened Left Bank Books. They saw it as a way to make literature available that could not easily be found in other bookstores. There was no internet, no online shopping, no email, no MSBC or Democracy Now. Rolling Stone was considered subversive. Printing presses, the proving ground of the First Amendment, decided what they would print. Literally, if you owned the printing press, you owned speech. The movement of “underground” radical weekly rags was only just getting started.

      In 1970, one of those Left Bank Books graduate students, Larry Kogan, was among several who were arrested in a protest on the Wash. U. campus the night after four students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. He served ninety days at a Springfield, MO prison in 1972.  He was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981 and died in 1998 (May his memory be a blessing.).

    In 1975, Larry Kogan, former political prisoner, hired me to work at Left Bank Books. I had just turned twenty-one.

   Larry was the only person I knew who served actual time for his political beliefs. It made a huge, lifelong impression on me, and, along with being a writer and a bookseller, seared into my world view the vital importance of First Amendment rights to free expression. To me, Larry was someone who truly stood up for what he believed and paid a price. I saw this as inseparable from the mission of the bookstore.

    By 1979, the collective that founded Left Bank had moved on and Barry Leibman and I, two of the store’s employees, found ourselves the owners of a fair amount of debt and some books. We commenced to learn the art of running a business with no capital. Kissinger, the architect of more war crimes, was still advising presidents.

   In 1999, over twenty years later, we got a call from our sales rep for the publisher of the third volume of Kissinger’s memoir, Years of Renewal. They were organizing a book tour and offered an event with Kissinger to us. I knew this was a huge book for them and having a bookstore turn down an event could reflect negatively on their position as a major publisher with this powerful author. I especially knew that our sales rep would be in an awkward position for going to bat for our store only to have us turn it down. Nevertheless.

   “I have to respectfully decline,” I told him. “I know this is a big deal for Simon & Schuster. I’m flattered you thought of us. But our core customers would be confused by us hosting such an event. We would not be able to give him the publicity he requires. Our reputation would overshadow his event. I don’t want to do that to Simon.”

    All fine and well. His tour happened, we were not part of it. A nonstory. And then one day three months down the line, out of the blue, I got a call from Jerry Berger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gossip columnist. Oh no, I thought. I have no idea at all what he wants but there is no way this is going to be good.  

    “Kris,” I remember Jerry saying. “I heard you said no to an event with Henry Kissinger! Good for you! Good for you!”

Damn, I thought, how in the world did this get to Jerry Berger? For a split second I considered saying “no comment” but I knew that it would never be our story if I did that. I took a breath and confirmed the rumor. Then I hung up and resigned myself to the knowledge that whatever happened next was completely out of my control.

   Sunday morning, April 11, my partner at the time and I came downstairs for breakfast at the bed & breakfast where we were spending the weekend in St. Genevieve to find the Post-Dispatch neatly folded to the top of page two with the headline:

Left Bank Books Gives Kissinger the Kiss-Off

    It was already awkward enough that we were a lesbian couple in a very straight bed and breakfast in southern Missouri. The kind with little Christian Hallmark art on the walls. My stomach fell. “You’re famous!” our host said.

   We were the lead story in Jerry’s weekly gossip column in a time when people, as in everyone, actually read the paper. Especially Jerry’s column. I picked up the paper and read what was basically word for word what I had said to Jerry a few days ago on the phone:

    “ ‘We have to stand for something,’ said the book store’s owner, Kris Kleindienst. ‘We respectfully declined based upon profound differences of convictions. It’s hard for us to forget about the secret bombings of Cambodia. In my opinion, he’s kind of a war criminal. Times are hard, but not that hard!’ ”

    This is not going to go well, I thought, and I didn’t mean with our hosts at the B&B. This was a time before everyone was wired to their cell phones and it was an agonizing 24 hours until I got to work Monday morning and heard an earful about the crank calls to the store on Sunday. My business partners were by no means pleased with the bad attention the store was getting when it needed all the help it could get.

    To those who accused the store of censorship, of being hypocritical, I said, “This man has several books in print and easily available. Any time he sneezes he can command media. He doesn’t need our platform to be heard. We have a discerning and thoughtful collection of books on our shelves, including copies of his new book. We can order anything you want. This is not even close to censorship.”

     But what happened after a few days was unexpected. The crank calls stopped. In the days to come, people went out of their way to stop by and let us know that even if they did not think Kissinger was a bad man, they appreciated that we had stood by our convictions. Some told us they were even Republicans but respected our decision. Two said they had had lively discussions over lunch in the teacher’s cafeterias where they taught high school and the consensus was that based on who we were, we did the right thing.

   What I took from this was that you can run a business with a conscience. That profits don’t have to be based on going against your core values. Of course, we were far from profitable at that time and still hope to stand on the horizon of profitability one day, but the support we have received, often in the form of generous donations to the nonprofit we started, speaks volumes about the importance of a space like ours to its community. I have always thought that if I was going to give my life to something that would barely support me financially, at least I should be able to live with myself at the end of the day.

   Socially responsible business was still a fairly vague concept in 1999. Revealing your politics as a business was a huge no-no. I can’t say I haven’t made mistakes in what we have done in this bookstore. Some author appearances may have been questionable when thrown up against our core values. Our sense of what and who community is has expanded over the years with the success of the movements for social justice of which the store is a part. But I allow myself the grace of being able to make mistakes, to test those values against the complexity of real situations, and grow, both as a person and as a bookstore.

   Writing this in the early days after Mr. Kissinger has died feels like a very, very long nightmare has finally ended. I think a lot of us are shaking ourselves free of its dark caul. It has been a very abusive relationship. Cambodians are still being maimed and killed by the carpet bomb calling cards Kissinger left all over their country in 1969. My entire adult life’s work has been in some important ways a resistance to the world Kissinger built.

    Kissinger’s legacy will live on for decades. But so will the work of entities like Left Bank Books and the broad community we serve. Each generation since the one that came of age in 1969 builds on the work begun during the Vietnam War, work that built on work of social justice activists of the generations before, from pacifists and union organizers, to suffragists and abolitionists. We continue those legacies, learning, building, reframing, refreshing. There are many ways to do the work but there is only one goal: human dignity and respect for the planet.

   Many thanks to the reluctant activist, Larry Kogan, to all the Left Bank booksellers over the years, and to the many, many authors writing books that dare to speak truth to power, authors whose work we continue to center in our programming and on our shelves. I draw strength from you every day.

This essay is adapted from a work in progress.

---