This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED conference than a life-and-death struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me, whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered, Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.
Ferguson devotes an entire volume to the period of Kissinger’s life that Walter Isaacson tells in 139 pages out of 767. This volume ends with president-elect Richard Nixon’s appointment of his national security adviser—and a portentous few pages on Kissinger’s appointment of a military adviser, a young Army colonel called Alexander Haig. Freed of the psychological pressure to get to the good bits, whatever horror you fancy in Kissinger’s public career, Ferguson has the space fully to explore every aspect of Kissinger’s past, including the most thorough account of the experience of his Jewish family in gritty Fürth, northern Bavaria, which had in 1813 taken the name Kissinger.
Arriving in New York at the age of 15, Kissinger turns himself into an American adolescent, a soldier, and a married student at Harvard on the GI Bill, where he prepared himself for his career as Harvard professor, defense intellectual, foreign policy adviser to the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, and secretary of state in waiting to the man he thought would be the sixties’ greatest president, Nelson Rockefeller. When Ferguson is through, there is very little left of the picture of Kissinger as a wounded victim of history, or of court Jew—the man whom Isaacson described as a born courtier, “incorrigibly attracted to powerful, charismatic, and wealthy people.”
Ferguson depicts a very different type of midcentury figure. Kissinger enters history as a man of action in the mold of Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and André Malraux, with rifle in his hand. (Had it not been for World War II, Ferguson muses, Kissinger might have become a successful accountant.) History thrust him into the Battle of the Bulge, and as the U.S. Army advanced toward the Rhine, Kissinger found himself—with a rank never higher than staff sergeant—the de facto administrator of just-captured towns in southern Germany just behind the front, where he had to deal on his own with starvation and looting among a sullen, occasionally violent populace.
Soon he became a counterintelligence agent, routing out Wehrmacht cells behind American lines, for which he earned his Bronze Star. Even during basic training, the Army gave him, for the first time, the sense of being fully American, and he felt committed to its mission in Germany not as a Jew, but as someone dedicated to a common purpose. His distraught parents in New York wanted him to come home from that “terrible place,” and he tried to explain why he couldn’t: He and a friend had made a promise to one another the night Hitler died that “we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all previous sacrifices meaningful. We would stay just long enough to do that.”
The sense of commitment to a mission that American arms discovered in action—that we had a responsibility to restore the world—kept Sergeant Kissinger in the Army and propelled him through the first 20 years of his academic career. As student and professor, Kissinger advised not realism but its opposite; not American supremacy but a commitment to our allies’ self-determination; not icy superiority but a sympathetic understanding of the motives of our adversaries, partners, and standers-by. Above all, he believed that a great power had the same obligation to commitment and action that he had felt as a soldier in Germany.
Kissinger was the same kind of idealist as John Locke, who argued for British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession because “how fond soever I am of peace I think truth ought to accompany it, which cannot be preserved without Liberty. Nor that without the Balance of Europe kept up.”
Early and late, Kissinger counseled an ethic of action as both strategy and principle. In 1950, he formulated a criticism of Harry Truman’s policy of containment because it yielded all initiative to our adversaries. Containment had become, in effect,
In his first book, published in 1957, he made the same point about Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles’s reliance on mutually assured destruction. Kissinger saw the fruits of these policies in the twin crises of 1956, Suez and the Hungarian uprising. “The petty bureaucrats in Washington,” he wrote to a colleague, “were more outraged with Britain and France than with the Soviets because the British upset their plans more completely. And they were even a little bit irritated with the Hungarians because they forced them into making decisions it would have been simpler never to have had to face. . . . And the Hungarians have shown us the insignificance of our moral stature.” To McGeorge Bundy, he wrote a few weeks later: “We may have proved that aggression does not pay”—for France and Britain, not the Soviet Union—“but we have done so to people least likely to disturb the peace. . . . I would feel happier about professions of high moral principles if they did not so frequently coincide with a policy of minimum risk.”
With equal consistency and fervor, Kissinger criticized the United States of 1956 on another point: It was not idealist enough, and it seldom bothered to articulate its ideals to the rest of the world. “We, the empiricists, appear to the world as rigid, unimaginative, and even somewhat cynical, while the dogmatic Bolsheviks exhibit flexibility, daring and subtlety,” he lamented in the year of Suez. We promised the world more prosperity, but “unless we address ourselves to the problem of encouraging institutions which protect human dignity the future of freedom is dim indeed.” We justify our actions on the basis “of a communist threat, very rarely on the basis of things we wanted to do because of our intrinsic dynamism.” In an early television interview (1958) he told Mike Wallace:
Instead, our leadership was programmatically indifferent to the national aspirations of our allies—and incapable of deciding who our allies should be. Kissinger wanted the Germans to take a bigger role in the Berlin crisis than John F. Kennedy wanted them to do; he admired the fractious Charles de Gaulle and thought he was correct on such matters as maintaining France’s independent nuclear force de frappe. When nominal allies showed that they were incapable of acting in their own interests—as he thought the South Vietnamese were not—Kissinger believed that they should not be regarded as being worth the sacrifice of American resources and lives.
Those who know Niall Ferguson’s newspaper writings will understand that he shares his subject’s deep admiration for America, and the conviction that we cannot shirk our role on the world stage. When Kissinger is frustrated with American leaders and bureaucrats who lack the ability or instinct (or even the desire) to explain and defend their country against the criticism of allies or the malice of enemies—no one understands better than Ferguson.
But it is more than a shared view of foreign policy that makes Ferguson Kissinger’s proper biographer. He has a deep affinity for Kissinger as a human being. Biographer and subject came to America as, more or less, adults; each survived the horrors of being a newcomer at Harvard; both were precociously successful academics whose celebrity beyond the campus earned them the scorn of more conventional and less productive colleagues. Neither contented himself with early success: They continued to work prodigiously hard with an intensity which may have injured the happiness of each man’s family. Ferguson describes with sadness the breakdown of Kissinger’s marriage and in his acknowledgments, thanks his own ex-wife with dignified candor.
The greatest affinity between Ferguson and Kissinger is their devotion to history as a way of understanding the world. Ferguson made his mark with a particularly swinging kind of counterfactual history. His first book, The Pity of War, depicted a world much better off without Britain’s entry into World War I. He greets Kissinger as a fellow counterfactual historian, understanding the profound un-inevitability of the world around him. In his career as a policy intellectual, Kissinger soon learned that America’s leadership, both political and military, preferred to understand the world as lawyers see it, and sometimes cherished its historical ignorance, which extended in the Kennedy administration (so Kissinger thought) from the White House down to the lowliest grunt serving in South Vietnam.
Ferguson makes us admire the subtlety and flexibility of Kissinger’s historical understanding, but it is not always easy to grasp. The polarity of idealism and realism begins to bind and limit Ferguson in much the same way Kissinger thought American reliance on mutually assured destruction and containment gave the initiative to the Soviet Union. Kissinger’s adversaries can seem to determine the battlefield on which Ferguson must fight and define the charges against which Kissinger must be defended. Where Ferguson writes that Kennedy really did seek Kissinger’s advice, and that Kissinger really did want to initiate peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968, you begin to feel that Niall Ferguson is speaking to someone over your shoulder.
After such knowledge as Ferguson provides, what forgiveness? Or what acquaintance? For me, Henry Kissinger’s personality remains elusive. An aspect of Kissinger’s military career, once again, explains more than anything else. Most counterintelligence officers were, like Kissinger, no more than NCOs; their uniforms bore no badge of rank at all, and only generals were entitled to know it. Sergeant Kissinger had the power “to order . . . immediate and unquestioned assistance of available troops . . . from any officer up to and including a full colonel,” as a fellow counterintelligence officer explained. If an officer asked his rank, Kissinger’s instructions were to reply, “My rank is confidential, but at this moment, I am not outranked.”
Even after Niall Ferguson’s work, this may be the most telling description we have of the real man.
Sam Schulman is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
