Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, Lally Weymouth and Ira Rennert
Mortimer Zuckerman and Ralph Lauren
Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder	Rabbi Arthur Schneier, Ambassador Ron Prosor and Henry Kissinger

WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS
Kissinger Speaks Like
He’s Just Off The Boat

STORY AND PHOTOS BY TIM BOXER

W

HO can cut through Henry Kissinger’s thick Teutonic accent? Maybe that’s one reason Richard Nixon tape recorded in the Oval Office — so he could take time later to decipher his secretary of state’s statements.

Even Barbara Walters was baffled. When she was on NBC’s Today show, the first interview she did outside the studio was Kissinger, the national security advisor at the time.

"He had a very strong accent and I sometimes had him repeat what he was saying," she related at a World Jewish Congress dinner on November 11, at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Walters said she asked Kissinger, newly installed at the White House, "So how does it feel to be a new kind of sex symbol in Washington?"

"I love it," Kissinger replied. "Now when I bore people, they think it’s their fault."

That cracked up the high profilers in the grand ballroom, which included Leonard Lauder, Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman, Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert, Ralph Lauren, and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor who brought his son, Lior, and Lior’s wife Maya, who was seven months pregnant.

Walters once asked Kissinger’s younger brother, Walter Kissinger, why he never had an accent like Henry. "Because I listened," he said.

Even Kissinger had trouble with one’s speech. Not his own, of course. "When Yitzhak Rabin was ambassador in Washington," he recalled, "I thought he was a terrible speaker. He mumbled all the time."

Born in 1923 in Furth, Bavaria, Kissinger has been in America since 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution. He’s been here 76 years and still speaks like he stepped off the boat yesterday!

WJC president Ronald Lauder bestowed the group’s Theodor Herzl Award on Kissinger. Lauder said that President Nixon once mentioned to Prime Minister Golda Meir how remarkable it was that both the United States and Israel had Jewish foreign ministers, Abba Eban and Kissinger.

"Yes," Golda said. "But ours speaks English."

Lauder, New York-born 70 years ago, speaks flawless English like the diplomat he is (having served as U.S. ambassador to Austria 1986-87). Now he engages in diplomacy for world Jewry.

He maintains that just as every country in the world has a foreign ministry to represent them around the world, the World Jewish Congress is "the foreign ministry, the diplomatic arm, of the Jewish people throughout the diaspora."