Eli Lake, Columnist

Kissinger's Washington Is Coming Back Around

The president-elect campaigned as a populist, but he’s seeking help from a mainstay of the global elite.

January 4, 2017 at 11:00 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

He's back.
Photographer: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/Getty Images

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Let’s take a moment to savor what looks to be Henry Kissinger’s final act. The man is 93 years old. At that age, most people are lucky to have enough energy for “Wheel of Fortune” and a few Facebook posts. Not Kissinger. These days, he’s playing the influence game against insiders who hadn’t even been born when he was Richard Nixon’s secretary of state.

Officials with Donald Trump’s transition team tell me Kissinger has spent several hours since the election advising incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and his team. He’s also putting his network in place. He recommended his former assistant, K.T. McFarland, to be Flynn’s deputy, and urged Trump to nominate Rex Tillerson, the chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil, as his secretary of state. Kissinger is one of the few people in Trump’s orbit who can get him on the phone whenever he wants, according to one transition adviser.