Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

*The other members of the group were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. Although Elliott never adopted the mantle of Agrarianism, as Ransom did in I’ll Take My Stand , he remained sympathetic to the Anglophile conservatism of his southern friends.

*The coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica and author of the dauntingly abstruse Process and Reality , Whitehead had driven philosophy toward mathematics and physics and far away from politics.

*Kant provided three distinct formulations of the categorical (as opposed to hypothetical) imperative in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785): “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction”; “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end”; and “Act as if you are through your maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.”

*A Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist of prodigious intellect and Jewish origin, Neumann had already made pioneering contributions to set theory, geometry, and quantum mechanics before being invited in 1930 to Princeton, where he proceeded to revolutionize mathematics with a stream of papers on ergodic theory, operator theory, lattice theory, and quantum logic, as well as transforming economics with the introduction of game theory.

*Kent’s Law of Coups was “that those coups that are known about in advance don’t take place”; his Law of Intelligence was that “of the things our state must know about other states some 90 percent may be discovered through overt means.”

*Before coming to Harvard in the fall of 1949, Bundy had coauthored the memoirs of Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s wartime secretary of war. Like Kissinger, Bundy found an invaluable patron in Bill Elliott, who was willing to hire the thirty-one-year-old scholar, despite his never having taken a course in political science.

*Kennan was so fearful of the Communist threat that in his ill-conceived “short telegram” from Manila on March 15, 1948, he suggested canceling the Italian elections and outlawing the Communist Party, even at the risk of civil war and an American reoccupation of military bases on the peninsula.

*Kissinger had been introduced to Kintner by Fritz Kraemer.

*The area north of Seoul where many U.S. troops were (and still are) based.

*Conway, who had lost a hand when serving with the Canadian infantry in Italy in 1944, was master of Leverett House from 1957 to 1963 and a dedicated undergraduate teacher. He published a number of books on Canadian history.

*It was during an International Seminar visit to her at Hyde Park, New York, that Kissinger’s beloved Smoky died of heat exhaustion, having been inadvertently locked in a sealed car.

*Of the other thirteen Harvard political science doctorates awarded in 1954, six were on contemporary international themes: on labor policy in occupied Japan, on Iranian nationalism, on the British National Health Service (two dissertations), on United Nations peacekeeping and international refugees. The only other student of the nineteenth century was Gordon Lewis, who had written about the Christian Socialists of 1848.

*For most of the Cold War, the overwhelming majority of American experts, including Kissinger, consistently overrated the Soviet system’s economic capacity and potential. In 1953 the Soviet economy was one-third the size of the U.S. economy.

*The primary inspiration for Strangelove was in reality Herman Kahn, a number of whose ideas are directly referenced in Kubrick’s script. Like Kissinger, however, Kahn was of Jewish origin, and unlike Kissinger, he had been born in the United States. Strangelove, by contrast, is clearly a former Nazi and in that respect bears a resemblance to Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist.

*It should be remembered that, while Kissinger himself was never a drinker, practically everyone else in 1950s America was consuming quantities of spirits that would now be considered excessive. See for details DeVoto, Hour .

*From 1945 until 1958, Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote the thrice-weekly “Matter of Fact” column for the New York Herald Tribune. Harvard men of impeccable WASP heritage, they described themselves as “Republicans by inheritance and registration, and… conservatives by political conviction.”

*“Well, Arthur,” Kissinger told Schlesinger many years later, “you are the one who promoted me into the public arena, you have only yourself to blame for the damage you cause to the country.” Kissinger remained grateful to Schlesinger for the rest of his life, as the latter’s son Andrew records in more than one entry in his as-yet-unpublished diary, and as Kissinger himself made clear in his eulogy for Schlesinger in 2007.

*Prior to succeeding Stuart Symington as secretary of the air force, Finletter had been chairman of Truman’s Air Policy Commission.

*“I am not overly sympathetic to disarmament proposals except for their psychological impact. In history disarmament has usually followed, not preceded, a detente. If nations could agree on disarmament they could agree on other things, and then in turn the need for the armaments would disappear.”

*This was the first such “summit” meeting of U.S. and Soviet leaders since Potsdam ten years before, at which the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, had also been present. At Geneva, Eisenhower, Premier Nikolai Bulganin, and Prime Minister Anthony Eden were to be joined by the French prime minister, Edgar Faure. Four-power meetings were already an anachronism. From 1959 onward, the key summits of the Cold War would be bilateral. In all there would be more than twenty “superpower” summits, involving only the U.S. and Soviet leaders.

*Kissinger later said of Armstrong, “He thinks that God on the seventh day created Foreign Affairs .”

*A crucial role in this regard was played by General Andrew J. Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s staff secretary.

*The “Atoms for Peace” speech was among the most publicized in history. There was saturation coverage in U.S. newspapers, radio, television, and newsreel. Voice of America carried the speech live in over thirty languages. There was even a commemorative stamp.

*A survey of 502 government officials who held high positions from 1945 to 1972 found that more than half of them were members of the Council on Foreign Relations. At any given time in the period, the proportion of the membership accounted for by government employees was close to a fifth. As a New York — based entity, the CFR’s members were mostly in finance, the media, or academia.

*Gavin — whose fondness of parachute jumps had earned him the soubriquet “Jumpin’ Jim”—would resign from the army in 1958 in the belief that the United States was lagging behind in the arms race.

*Also present that day were Frank Altschul of the General American Investors Company, Hanson W. Baldwin of The New York Times, Ben T. Moore, Charles P. Noyes II, and Henry L. Roberts. The remaining members of the study group, who were absent, were Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs; William A. M. Burden, president of the Museum of Modern Art; Thomas K. Finletter, the former air force secretary; the lawyer Roswell Gilpatric, who had been undersecretary of the air force under Truman; Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, who had succeeded Oppenheimer as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; Walter Bedell Smith, who had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff, then director of central intelligence and undersecretary of state; and Henry DeWolf Smyth, who had been a member of the AEC but had resigned after Oppenheimer lost his security clearance.