Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

*Allen later stated that Kissinger had “volunteered information to us through… a former student, that he had in the Paris peace talks.” It is not clear who this can have been.

*It should be recalled that publication of this memoir sparked a widespread protest led by the Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoirs (slogan: “Don’t Buy Books by Crooks”). The verdict of J. K. Galbraith bears repeating. “That Nixon was a rascal is now generally accepted. But, as… this book superbly affirms, he was and remains a rascal who either considers himself a deeply moral man or, at a minimum, believes that he can so persuade any known audience…. Nixon’s belief [is] here affirmed, that the misuse of FBI, IRS, and other federal agencies is one of the accepted rights of incumbency.” “The Good Old Days,” The New York Review of Books, June 29, 1978.

*Areeda had been White House assistant special counsel in Eisenhower’s second term.

*Rockefeller’s speechwriter Joseph Persico may also have played a part, along with economics adviser Richard Nathan, a Harvard Ph.D. who was then a researcher at the Brookings Institution. However, Nathan’s expertise was in domestic economic policy, not in the international issues addressed in this speech.

*In an interview for the San Francisco Chronicle in March 1965, Morgenthau declared, “If I could use a certain four letter word on this campus, I could sum up our policy in Vietnam.”

*It is of course conceivable that Kissinger subsequently destroyed or simply did not record evidence of his activities.

*Chennault, née Chan, was the widow of General Claire Chennault, leader of the “Flying Tigers,” a volunteer air force that fought on the Chinese nationalist side in World War II. Madame Chennault had close links to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan. She was cochair, along with Mamie Eisenhower, of Republican Women for Nixon.

*The least interesting parts of the essay were the prescriptive sections calling, wearily, for “a new look at American national security policy,” burden-sharing between the United States and the other members of NATO, and the “overriding need for a common [transatlantic] political conception.” Kissinger had been saying such things for years.

*At that time Goldman was running the German Research Program at CFIA, as well as the Kennedy School’s German Program. “How long have you been a graduate student?” asked Kissinger one day. Goldman replied that he was in his ninth year. “No graduate student of mine,” retorted Kissinger, “goes into double figures.”

*Whether there was any real merit in the credibility argument will be among the questions addressed in volume 2.

*The allusion was probably to Benjamin Disraeli, who used the phrase “peace I hope with honor” in a speech on July 27, 1878, following his triumphant return from the Congress of Berlin, where he had not only averted war with Russia but had largely reversed the gains Russia had made from its attack on the Ottoman Empire and acquired Cyprus for the British Empire into the bargain. It is doubtful that Kissinger intended to evoke Chamberlain’s use of the phrase after Munich; it is also doubtful that he knew of Edmund Burke’s use of it in his pro-American speech of 1775. Its first use in English is in fact in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, act 3, scene 2.

*The term had first been used by William H. Whyte, Jr., best known for his book The Organization Man, in an article for Fortune in 1952.

*The others interviewed were Robert Strausz-Hupé, founder of the Foreign Policy Research Institute; William Kintner, the specialist in psychological warfare; and Roy L. Ash, the president of Litton Industries, the Wisconsin defense contractor. Strausz-Hupé became ambassador to Sri Lanka, suggesting that he had singularly failed to impress Nixon or his staff. Kintner succeeded him at FPRI. Ash went on to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the creation of which he recommended as chairman of Nixon’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization.

*The context was a panel on “The Intellectual and the White House Policy Maker” at the American Political Science Association’s September 1968 conference.

*“A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll… point you True North from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing True North?”

*As Kissinger later put it, less reverently, he was “like a Jewish mother who worried when I got out of his jurisdiction.”

*Acton’s argument in his letter to Mandell Creighton of 1887 was that historians should not judge the “great men” of the past — he had in mind the popes of the pre-Reformation era — by less exacting standards than those of Victorian law. “I cannot accept your canon,” he wrote, “that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” Creighton was himself a bishop, whereas Acton — aside from a brief and undistinguished period as an MP — was only ever an academic and public intellectual. “[A]nyone engaged in great affairs occupied a representative position,” Creighton replied, “which required special consideration. Selfishness, even wrongdoing, for an idea, an institution, the maintenance of an accepted view of the basis of society, does not cease to be wrongdoing: but it is not quite the same as personal wrongdoing…. The acts of men in power are determined by the effective force behind them of which they are the exponents…. [T]he men who conscientiously thought heresy a crime may be accused of an intellectual mistake, not necessarily of a moral crime…. I am hopelessly tempted to admit degrees of criminality, otherwise history becomes a dreary record of wickedness. I go so far with you that it supplies me with few heroes, and records few good actions; but the actors were men like myself, sorely tempted by the possession of power, trammeled by holding a representative position (none were more trammeled than popes), and in the sixteenth century especially looking at things in a very abstract way…. I cannot follow the actions of contemporary statesmen with much moral satisfaction. In the past I find myself regarding them with pity — who am I that I should condemn them?” Which man was the wiser? Acton, after all, had urged Gladstone to back the Confederacy in the American Civil War and lamented its defeat.

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