Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

*“To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny…. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas…. Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace…. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

*Of Mrs. Lincoln, the president once said that “if he called to inform her that he had just cut off Jackie’s head and wanted to get rid of it, the devoted secretary would appear immediately with a hatbox of appropriate size.”

*Kissinger described Birrenbach as “belong[ing] to the finger-pointing, lapel clutching variety of German” but “nevertheless a man of some influence. He is in charge of the Thyssen Enterprises. Though old man Thyssen bankrolled Hitler, Birrenbach himself spent the Nazi Period in exile. He is a friend of the Chancellor and is used by the latter to sound out opinion in English-speaking countries, under the mistaken impression that Birrenbach has a special way with Americans” (to Schlesinger, May 25, 1962).

*Kissinger once congratulated Marion Dönhoff on “the fortitude with which you sat through a speech I made in German.”

*France had successfully detonated a nuclear bomb in southern Algeria on February 13, 1960.

*A “memcon” is a memorandum of a face-to-face conversation. These are the earliest surviving memcons written by Kissinger. Their vivid style contrasts markedly with the staid official reports sent when U.S. diplomats were also present.

*The allusion was to the Treaty of Rapallo (1922), signed by the Weimar Republic with the Soviet Union, one of many attempts by interwar German governments to extricate themselves from the constraints of the Versailles Treaty by dealing with Moscow. Kissinger would later make similar arguments against Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik .

*She survived the procedure but suffered permanent mental damage and was institutionalized for the rest of her long life.

*To be precise, in 1962 the Soviet Union had 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles; the United States had at least 180. The Soviets had 200 long-range bombers; the Americans had 630. The Soviets had only six submarines with the ability to launch up to three ballistic missiles from the sea; the Americans had twelve Polaris submarines, each carrying twelve nuclear missiles. These figures make it clear how absurd the “missile gap” panic of the late 1950s was.

*The United Arab Republic had been set up in 1958 as a union between Egypt and Syria. In 1961 Syria had seceded, but Egypt continued to refer to itself as the UAR until 1971.

*After his retirement, be became a consultant for the U.S. defense company Northrop.

*Hans Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld was an aristocratic German diplomat who served his country more or less uninterruptedly from 1927 until his retirement in 1977. Lübke had worked for Albert Speer during the war and was certainly aware of the use of slave labor at the Peenemünde air base; revelations of his role in the Third Reich led to his resignation in 1969.

*Kissinger was correct. Unlike Kühlmann-Stumm and Erich Mende, Achenbach had been a Nazi Party member from 1937. As head of the political department of the German embassy in Paris during the war, Achenbach had been directly involved in the deportation of Jews from France to the death camps.

*Kissinger later remembered being asked by Adenauer, “How much time do you spend working for the government?” Kissinger replied that he spent around a quarter of his time. “Then,” said Adenauer, “I can assume you are telling me the truth three-quarters of the time.”

*The son of a locksmith, Dobrynin had joined the diplomatic service in 1946 and had briefly served as deputy secretary general at the United Nations in 1957. He was to remain ambassador to the United States until 1986, serving under six U.S. presidents and becoming perhaps Kissinger’s single most important foreign interlocutor.

*Here Kissinger surely erred. The advent of nuclear submarines from 1959 onward was crucial in the transition from a potentially explosive Cold War to the equilibrium that Donald Brennan of the Hudson Institute later satirically christened “Mutual Assured Destruction.” The key point was that submarines with nuclear missiles were virtually impossible to detect and destroy. Any first strike would therefore inevitably be countered by a devastating counterstrike from beneath the waves.

*“Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace may you slumber, / No danger lurks, your sleep to encumber, / We’ve got the missiles, peace to determine, / And one of the fingers on the button will be German.”

*On October 8, 1962, the magazine reported that the Bundeswehr was barely ready for the eventuality of a Soviet invasion, which prompted Strauss to order the arrest of the magazine’s publisher, its editors-in-chief, and the journalist who wrote the story. When it became clear that Strauss had acted illegally, the FDP threatened to bring down Adenauer’s government. Strauss was forced to resign; the grand coalition did not become a reality for another four years.

*Hal Sonnenfeldt, like Kissinger, had been born into a Jewish family in Germany (in 1926), had left the country in 1938, and had served in the U.S. Army. He had joined the State Department in 1952. In 1963 he was appointed head of the Soviet section of the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

*The ExComm’s core members were: President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Defense Secretary McNamara, Attorney General Kennedy, Director of Central Intelligence McCone, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, and Special Assistant Bundy. But more than twenty other officials participated in ExComm meetings as and when required.

*The allusion is to Anthony Trollope’s novels The American Senator and John Caldigate, in which a casual gesture is deliberately misinterpreted as a marriage proposal. In this case, the Kennedy brothers were responding to Khrushchev’s two proposals in the way that suited them best, by all but ignoring the second one.

*Though he was not a strong social conservative — he would later resist the Christian right’s pressure to politicize abortion and gay rights — Goldwater’s campaign for the Republican nomination benefited from the scandal surrounding Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage. More substantive was the contrast between Goldwater’s anti — New Deal economic libertarianism and Rockefeller’s tax-and-spend record as governor of New York.

*The consequences of a less progressive domestic program are especially hard to imagine. In Stephen King’s alternative-history novel 11/22/63 , a reelected Kennedy finds himself presiding over a nationwide backlash against the civil rights movement that culminates in the election of Governor George Wallace of Alabama as president in 1968. Wallace then escalates the Vietnam War to the point of using nuclear weapons, with disastrous consequences.

*Under the agreements reached at the end of the 1954 Geneva conference, France agreed to withdraw its troops from Indochina, which was split into three countries: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was to be temporarily divided along the 17th parallel until elections could be held, after which the country would be united. However, the United States did not sign the document, and the elections never took place. Although Walter Bedell Smith, the U.S. representative at Geneva, appeared to commit Washington to abide by them, in practice the United States backed Ngo Dinh Diem’s proclamation of South Vietnam as an independent state.