Smooth operator …

… The Sins of Leon Wieseltier | The Weekly Standard.

After his years at Harvard, a school useful above all for making connections, Leon had acquired a job at the New Republic, a liberal weekly that had not long before been bought by a man named Martin Peretz, a wealthy, part-time instructor at Harvard. During his early days on the magazine, Leon published a longish piece there on, of all things, nuclear war. Nothing very distinguished about it, either, the thought of taking him seriously on such a large subject was in fact slightly gigglesome, but it suggested to me that young Leon, with all the possibilities open to him, the good student with superior tuchus-lecking skills, was considering that of becoming our next Henry Kissinger. I subsequently learned he was aiming higher.