In my files I retain a page from a magazine article, a portrait of Henry Kissinger that I believe was written by Walter Isaacson. I reproduce here two paragraphs from the article and highlight a few phrases that I had underlined. A marginal notation that I wrote reads: "Tell me about it!" It was my belief that Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld managers' act of sharing personal information about me only heightened the harassment to which I was subjected at the firm during my employment there from 1988-1991. I found corroboration for this conclusion in the following article about Henry Kissinger.
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A desire to be accepted, a tendency to be distrustful and insecure; these were understandable reactions to a childhood upended by one of the most gruesome chapters in human history. Kissinger's desire for social and political acceptance--and his yearnings to be liked--was unusually ardent, so much so that it led him to compromise his beliefs at times.
One of Kissinger's insecurities as an adult was his feeling, sometimes half confessed through mordant humor, that he would
not fit in if he was too closely identified with his religion. Only partly in jest, he grumbled that
too much reporting about his family background could "bring every anti-Semite out of the woodwork" to attack him.
For Kissinger, the holocaust destroyed the connection between God's will and the progress of history--a tenet that is at the heart of the Jewish faith and is one of the religion's most important contributions to Western philosophy. For faithful Jews, the meaning of history is understood by its link to God's will and divine justice. After witnessing the Nazi horror, Kissinger would abandon the practice of Judaism, and as a young student at Harvard he would embark on an intellectual search for an alternative way to find the meaning of history.
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