Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

REPORTER: Dr. Kissinger, why are you here tonight?

KISSINGER: I was forced.

R: By who?

K: By Bobby [Evans].

R: Did he make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?

K: Yes. 56

As they fought their way through the throng, Evans had Kissinger on one arm and Ali MacGraw on the other.

The obvious retort to all this is that hostility to Kissinger had much more to do with actions like the mining of Haiphong harbor than with appearances at movie premieres. Still, less irenic motives for animosity cannot be dismissed out of hand. As early as January 1971, the columnist Joseph Kraft could report that Kissinger’s “closest friends and associates” had come to see him as “a suspect figure, personifying the treason of the intellectuals,” because he was working “to reinforce and legitimize the President’s hard-line instincts on most major international business.” 57The previous May, thirteen of his Harvard colleagues — among them Francis Bator, William Capron, Paul Doty, George Kistiakowsky, Richard Neustadt, Thomas Schelling, and Adam Yarmolinsky — had traveled to Washington to meet with him. Kissinger had expected to host a private lunch for them. Instead, according to one well-known account of the meeting, Schelling began by saying he should explain who they were. Kissinger was perplexed.

“I know who you are,” he said, “you’re all good friends from Harvard.”

“No,” said Schelling, “we’re a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy, and we have come to tell you so. We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisers.” Each of them then proceeded to berate him, taking five minutes apiece. 58

The group’s stated reason for breaking with Kissinger was the invasion of Cambodia. (As their spokesman Schelling put it, “There are two possibilities. Either, one, the President didn’t understand… that he was invading another country; or, two, he did understand. We just don’t know which one is scarier.”) 59No doubt Schelling and his colleagues had cogent reasons to criticize Nixon’s decision. Still, there was something suspiciously staged about their showdown with Kissinger. Each one of those named above had experience in government, and at high levels. Bator, for example, had served as deputy national security adviser to Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and had therefore enjoyed a ringside seat for the escalation of the war against North Vietnam. As Bator confessed to The Harvard Crimson, “Some of us here at Harvard have been working on the inside for a long time.” Neustadt, too, admitted that he had “regarded the executive branch as… home for twenty or thirty years…. This is the first time in years that I’ve come to Washington and stayed at the Hay-Adams and had to pay the bill out of my own pocket.”

For these men, publicly breaking with Kissinger — with journalists briefed in advance about the breach — was a form of self-exculpation, not to say an insurance policy as student radicals back on the Harvard campus ran riot. When Neustadt told the Crimson, “I think it’s safe to say we’re afraid,” he did not specify of what. Others were more candid. As Schelling put it, “If Cambodia succeeds, it will be a disaster not just because my Harvard office may be burned down when I get home, but it will even be a disaster in [the administration’s] own terms.” The historian Ernest May, who had rushed down from an emergency faculty meeting called to address student demands about examinations, told Kissinger, “You’re tearing the country apart domestically.” The country he meant was not Cambodia. After their meeting with Kissinger, as if to underline their contrition for past misdeeds, Neustadt and two of the others joined a much larger “Peace Action Strike” of Harvard students and faculty led by the antiwar firebrand Everett Mendelsohn. But the campus radicals were not propitiated. That same day the Center for International Affairs, where both Bator and Schelling had their offices, was invaded and “trashed” by demonstrators. 60

IV

Even if they have not always objected to his policies, critics have long taken exception to Henry Kissinger’s mode of operation. Driven by “excessive ambition,” he was “a consummate network-builder, operating on a nearly worldwide scale.” 61He was “the media’s best friend.” 62“A distinguished journalist once complained that it took him three days after every conversation with Henry Kissinger to recover his critical sense; unfortunately, in the meantime he had written his column.” 63Kissinger, we are told, loved secrecy almost as much as the diabolical Richard Nixon, with whom (in the eyes of Harvard, at least) he had made his Faustian pact. 64He wiretapped even members of his own staff, notably Morton Halperin. 65He was a sycophant, willing to put up with Nixon’s obnoxious anti-Semitism. 66But he was also deeply insecure, needing to be reassured by Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman “almost every day, certainly at least every week… that the President really did love him and appreciate him and couldn’t get along without him.” 67One of Kissinger’s most relentless critics, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, posed the question: “How [could]… Kissinger involve himself in their horrors[?]… How could he humiliate himself, use locker-room language, engage in such things as wiretapping?” The answer, Lewis argued, was “not in doubt: he did what had to be done to acquire and keep power — and to exercise it in secret.” 68In all these accounts, Kissinger is like an American equivalent of Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels — at once hateful and unstoppable.

The other possibility is that a great deal of what has been said against Kissinger stems from those with grudges against him. When, for example, George Ball described Kissinger as “self-centered and conspiratorial,” he was expressing the view of a State Department insider who resented the way he undermined Nixon’s now-all-but-forgotten secretary of state William P. Rogers. 69Raymond Garthoff was another official with an ax to grind: while negotiating the terms of SALT with the Soviets, he had been kept in the dark about Kissinger’s “back channel” to the Soviet ambassador. 70Hans Morgenthau once memorably described Kissinger as, like Odysseus, “ polytropos, that is, ‘many-sided’ or ‘of many appearances.’”

From that quality stems the fascination with which friends and foes, colleagues and strangers behold him. That quality encloses the secret of his success. Kissinger is like a good actor who does not play the role of Hamlet today, of Caesar tomorrow, but who is Hamlet today and Caesar tomorrow. 71

The Israeli press later boiled this down to a charge of “two faced diplomacy.” 72But was Morgenthau entirely disinterested in his criticism? Older than Kissinger by nearly ten years and, like Kissinger, of German-Jewish origin, he is regarded to this day as the founder of the “realist” school of U.S. foreign policy. Yet his Washington career — as a consultant to the Pentagon under Johnson — had ended when he refused to the toe the line on Vietnam. If anyone flinched to hear Kissinger hailed as the archrealist, it was Morgenthau.

A favorite theme of Kissinger’s critics was that he was fundamentally hostile, or at least indifferent, to democracy. “A policy commitment to stability and identifying instability with communism,” Morgenthau wrote, “is compelled by the logic of its interpretation of reality to suppress in the name of anticommunism all manifestations of popular discontent…. Thus, in an essentially unstable world, tyranny becomes the last resort of a policy committed to stability as its ultimate standard.” 73Similar sentiments can be found in multiple polemics. According to Richard Falk, Kissinger’s effectiveness stemmed from “his capacity to avoid unpleasant criticisms about… domestic indecencies”—a “Machiavellian posture” that was a welcome relief to the world’s dictators. 74Why a man who had fled the Third Reich and found success in the United States should be averse to democracy is not immediately obvious. But writer after writer has resolved the paradox by arguing that, in the words of David Landau, Kissinger was “a child of Weimar,” haunted by “the dread specter of revolution and political anarchy, the demise of all recognizable authority.” 75“Witnessing these events firsthand,” writes Jeremi Suri, “Henry Kissinger could only conclude that democracies were weak and ineffective at combating destructive enemies…. The solution was… to build space for charismatic, forward-looking undemocratic decisionmaking in government.” 76Thus he “often acted against what he saw as dangerous domestic opinion. To do otherwise, in his eyes, would repeat the mistakes of the democratic purists in the 1930s and bow to the weaknesses and extremes of mass politics… to the people protesting in the streets.” 77As we shall see, the defect of this argument is that Henry Kissinger was not yet ten years old when the Weimar Republic died, an age at which even quite precocious children are unlikely to have formed strong political opinions. His earliest political memories were of the regime that came next. Did growing up under Hitler somehow prejudice Kissinger against democracy? Bruce Mazlish offered the psychoanalytical interpretation that Kissinger’s “identification with the aggressor” was his way of “dealing with the Nazi experience.” 78As we shall see, however, a much more straightforward reading is possible.