BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Henry Kissinger, we all know by now, will head the commission investigating man intelligence failures in connection with 9/11. The media response has been muted, partly because of the holiday timing, but also because of Kissinger's peculiar position as a public figure. MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Look, there are a goodly number of Americans who spend each day in this country believing Henry Kissinger is an un-indicted war criminal!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:We spoke to Williams last year, after the U.S. press failed to report that Kissinger had been subpoenaed by a French judge in connection with a South American terror network.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Should Henry Kissinger answer for either perceived past sins or reasons why his name may be in the news today? Yes. I think everyone needs to understand, though, there's a time and place for everything.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now Kissinger is back in the news, and commentators ranging from William Safire of the New York Times to Steven Colbert of Comedy Central's Daily Show have noted that Kissinger's unusual background makes him the man for the job.

STEVEN COLBERT: If you want to investigate an assault on a democracy, who better to head it than the man who instigated the overthrow and assassination of the democratically-elected leader of Chile in 1973? [LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE] Who better to look into a secret attack than the man who secretly bombed Cambodia? [LAUGHTER] And in general, who better to investigate the failures of U.S. intelligence on behalf of the American people than the man who successfully kept the American people completely in the dark about U.S. intelligence? Plus, he had sex with Shirley MacLaine. [LAUGHTER]

RICHARD COHEN: He's always been, been criticized, criticized, criticized to, to no avail. I mean it isn't as if the criticism has stopped him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

RICHARD COHEN: He went from success to success to success! Much to the annoyance of his critics! So I think after a while people sort of tune it out.

BOB GARFIELD:Scott Armstrong, author and founder of the National Security Archive, says that given the nature of Kissinger's new job, with his mixed record in foreign and U.S. intelligence and his current work as consultant to unspecified foreign governments and multinational corporations, investigative journalists should have come up with something new. But Armstrong has yet to see it.

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: There've always been critics of Henry Kissinger. People ought to be out there reporting on it; reporting about what's in his interest; how does he relate to these events. There has not been a lot of digging. I mean who are his clients? He says he's resign his clients, if it's appropriate. Well, we need to know who the clients are if he's going to continue in that role. They include banks, energy companies, people that are involved in selling air frames and arms and so forth --international interests -- in which the Saudis and the Persian Gulf and the oil-dealing countries are right at the center of their activities. When you see investigative reporting that says here are who his clients are, here's what he's said in the past, here is how his record compares to these events, you know, that would be more in depth than what we've seen. What we've seen is a litany of reasons why Henry Kissinger's not a good person in the view of a lot of people, but not really applied to this particular case.

BOB GARFIELD:Christopher Hitchens suggested that the reason there has been so little specific inquiry into Kissinger's past that would disqualify him for this gig is that he has cultivated a relationship with certain celebrity journalists like Ted Koppel, for example, that makes him kind of unassailable.

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Henry Kissinger clearly has a relationship with some of the most important establishment people. I mean he is, he is the darling of a certain elite. He's the person that brings gravitas to the policy arguments that people like to have, and there are players, senior players in the journalistic community that eat that up, that see him socially, that I think are somewhat compromised from criticizing him. But journalism is an egalitarian game, and anybody that does their homework and anybody that digs up new facts can get a story in here that will cause an examination or a re-examination. The question is, who's going to re-examine it? The president gets to appoint it. And it's going to take a considerable outcry that's going to have to be picked up in Congress before it's going to make any difference.

BOB GARFIELD:Now Congress isn't in session. Had Congress been here and there had been complaints flying from the Democratic side of the aisle or better still from the Republican side of the aisle, do you think this might have been a bigger story?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: The president of the United States announced this on Thanksgiving eve for a reason. There was nobody in town. It was impossible to get anybody, and as a result he avoided a whole kind of round of criticism, so if Democrats had raised that question, if you had responsible actors posing questions and then have the administration have to respond to those questions, not because the press is asking them but because the minority leader is asking them or because somebody in, with an important committee in Congress is asking them -- even Republicans have raised questions about it -- then you would have had a dialogue that I think might have gotten them to say well maybe it shouldn't be Henry Kissinger. But it flew through because it was quiet, and it was winter skiing -- it just went downhill.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Now not everybody stayed at the dinner table. Some people got up to write pieces.

SCOTT ARMSTRONG:Well I think the, you know, the usual cast of characters that have things to say about Henry Kissinger did a pretty good job of reminding us all of the problems that Henry Kissinger's encountered in his life. There were some interesting things too, cause there were people on the right -- some conservatives --who raised questions about is this the right way to resolve this. The one that we kind of expected would be more critical was William Safire who has a relationship with Kissinger, is not a Kissinger admirer in all instances, but basically adopted this very odd takes a thief to catch a thief position. The, the problem with commentary was: people were not quoting other figures of integrity with their own gravitas and standing saying wait a minute -- that doesn't make sense to me. There really wasn't the resonance that's usually given in Washington when a story comes up; the press plays off against people who are able to say something that requires a response then from the administration.

BOB GARFIELD:In other words if someone had gone to John Dean to get the "You-have-got-to-be-kidding" quotation, they might have been doing a public service. [LAUGHS]

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Yes, but you know it's the people that were around during Watergate -- Dan Inouye, senator from Hawaii -- you know, I, I didn't see him quoted anywhere. People who had been involved in the energy investigations and the investigations of the Iran rescue mission that are around -- I think Carl Levin was around during that period. John Glenn, who's just left Congress but is still around -- those were people that have institutional memories and would say wait a minute - that's not the kind of person that can investigate the kind of things that they did. But we didn't have that. We didn't have people to play off.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Scott Armstrong as always, thanks very much.

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Thank you!

BOB GARFIELD: Scott Armstrong is a Washington-based journalist and founder of the National Security Archive. [MUSIC]