Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

Presciently, Peter Dickson foresaw what Kissinger’s predicament would be if the Cold War did indeed end, as it did, with a more or less bloodless American victory:

[Kissinger’s] notion that discord can surreptitiously lead to cooperation, the concept of self-limitation, and his characterization of foreign policy as a hierarchy of imperatives were all designed to inject a sense of purpose… [in]to American political culture as a whole… to restore meaning to history when Americans began to question seriously their nation’s role in the world…. Kissinger’s political philosophy constitute[d] a major break with the rationale of all postwar policy, which rested on the notion of America as a redeemer nation, as the guarantor of freedom and democracy…. [I]f at some future time the United States succeeds in fulfilling the role of redeemer, then Kissinger will be seen as a defeatist leader, as an historical pessimist who underestimated the appeal and relevance of democratic ideals and principles. 117

It is surely no accident that the most bitter denunciations of Kissinger came after the Soviet threat had — as if by magic — disappeared.

VIII

I have spent a substantial proportion of the last twenty years trying to understand better the nature of power and the causes of war and peace. Though I initially focused on the German Reich and the British Empire, my focus since moving across the Atlantic has been, perhaps inevitably, on that strange empire that dare not speak its name, the United States of America. My critique has been, if nothing else, nonpartisan. In 2001 I summed up Bill Clinton’s foreign policy as a case of “understretch,” in that the administration was too preoccupied with domestic scandal and too averse to casualties to make proper use of America’s vast capabilities. 118Three years later, in the early phase of the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq, I published a meditation on the American predicament: the heir to a British tradition of liberal imperialism, convinced of the benefits of free trade and representative government, yet constrained — perhaps fatally — by three deficits: a fiscal deficit (in the sense that spiraling welfare entitlements and debt must inevitably squeeze the resources available for national security), a manpower deficit (in the sense that not many Americans want to spend very long sorting out hot, poor countries), and above all, an attention deficit (in the sense that any major foreign intervention is likely to lose popularity within a four-year election cycle). 119I foresaw the direction we would take under Bush’s successor—“an imminent retreat from the principles of preemption and the practice of unilateralism”—well before his identity was known. I also anticipated some of the consequences of the coming American retreat. 120

Yet in researching the life and times of Henry Kissinger, I have come to realize that my approach was unsubtle. In particular, I had missed the crucial importance in American foreign policy of the history deficit: the fact that key decision makers know almost nothing not just of other countries’ pasts but also of their own. Worse, they often do not see what is wrong with their ignorance. Worst of all, they know just enough history to have confidence but not enough to have understanding. Like the official who assured me in early 2003 that the future of a post-Saddam Iraq would closely resemble that of post-Communist Poland, too many highly accomplished Americans simply do not appreciate the value, but also the danger, of historical analogy.

This is the biography of an intellectual, but it is more than just an intellectual biography because, in the evolution of Kissinger’s thought, the interplay of study and experience was singularly close. For that reason, I have come to see this volume as what is known in Germany as a bildungsroman — the story of an education that was both philosophical and sentimental. The story is subdivided into five books. The first takes Kissinger from his childhood in interwar Germany through forced emigration to the United States and back to Germany in a U.S. Army uniform. The second is about his early Harvard career, as an undergraduate, a doctoral student, and a junior professor, but it is also about his emergence as a public intellectual as a result of his work on nuclear strategy for the Council on Foreign Relations. The third describes his first experiences as an adviser, first to a candidate for the presidency — Nelson Rockefeller — and then to a president — John F. Kennedy. The fourth leads him down the twisted road to Vietnam and to the realization that the war there could not be won by the United States. The fifth and final book details the events leading up to his wholly unexpected appointment as national security adviser by Nixon.

Kissinger was a voracious reader, and so a part of his education self-evidently came from writers, from Immanuel Kant to Herman Kahn. Yet in many ways the biggest influences on him were not books but mentors, beginning with Fritz Kraemer — Mephistopheles to Kissinger’s Faust. And the most important lessons he learned came as much from his own experience as from their instruction. I have concluded that four precepts in particular should be considered as the essential assets in the intellectual capital that Kissinger brought with him as he entered the White House in January 1969: his sense that most strategic choices are between lesser and greater evils; his belief in history as the mother lode of both analogies and insights into the self-understanding of other actors; his realization that any decision is essentially conjectural and that the political payoffs to some courses of action may be lower than the payoffs of inaction and retaliation, even though the ultimate costs of the latter course may be higher; and finally, his awareness that realism in foreign policy, as exemplified by Bismarck, is fraught with perils, not least the alienation of the public and the slippage of the statesman into regarding power as an end in itself.

In aspiring to loftier ends, I believe, the young Kissinger was indeed an idealist.

Book I

CHAPTER 1 Heimat

Fürth ist mir ziemlich egal. (Fürth is a matter of indifference to me.)

— HENRY KISSINGER, 2004 1

I

Where exactly is a biographer to begin when his subject flatly denies the significance of his childhood for his later life?

It has often been suggested that growing up in the Germany of the 1930s “cast a traumatic shadow over [Kissinger’s]… adolescence.” For example: “The feeling of constantly being liable to unpredictable violence obviously laid deep in Kissinger’s psyche a kind of groundwork on which his later attitudes (even to nuclear war) could be built.” 2Another author has speculated that in the 1970s Kissinger “feared a return to the violence, chaos and collapse of Weimar Germany.” His attitudes to both the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, so the argument runs, are intelligible only in the light of his youthful experiences in Germany. Indeed, his entire philosophical and political outlook is said to have deep German roots. “The experience of Weimar Germany’s collapse… convinced… [him] that democracy had a very dark side.” That same experience supposedly made him a lifelong cultural pessimist. 3

Kissinger himself has repeatedly dismissed such theories. “My life in Fürth,” he declared in 1958, during a visit to his Bavarian birthplace, “seems to have passed without [leaving] any deeper impressions; I cannot recall any interesting or amusing incident.” 4Interviewed by Al Ellenberg of the New York Post in March 1974, he laconically conceded that he had “often… been chased through the streets, and beaten up” as a boy growing up in Nazi Germany. But he was quick to add, “That part of my childhood was not a key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy, I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious…. It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically. But let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life.” 5