Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

ALSO BY NIALL FERGUSON

The Great Degeneration

Civilization

High Financier

The Ascent of Money

The War of the World

Colossus

Empire

The Cash Nexus

The Pity of War

The House of Rothschild

Volume II: The World’s Banker, 1849–1999

The House of Rothschild

Volume I: Money’s Prophets, 1798–1848

Paper and Iron

PENGUIN PRESS

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New York, New York 10014

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Copyright © 2015 by Niall Ferguson

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Photograph credits appear here.

ISBN 978-0-698-19569-1

Version_1

IN MEMORIAM

Gerald Harriss (1925–2014)

Karl Leyser (1920–1992)

Angus Macintyre (1935–1994)

Contents

Also by Niall Ferguson

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

INTRODUCTION

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1 Heimat

CHAPTER 2 Escape

CHAPTER 3 Fürth on the Hudson

CHAPTER 4 An Unexpected Private

CHAPTER 5 The Living and the Dead

CHAPTER 6 In the Ruins of the Reich

BOOK II

CHAPTER 7 The Idealist

CHAPTER 8 Psychological Warfare

CHAPTER 9 Doctor Kissinger

CHAPTER 10 Strangelove?

CHAPTER 11 Boswash

BOOK III

CHAPTER 12 The Intellectual and the Policy Maker

CHAPTER 13 Flexible Responses

CHAPTER 14 Facts of Life

CHAPTER 15 Crisis

BOOK IV

CHAPTER 16 The Road to Vietnam

CHAPTER 17 The Unquiet American

CHAPTER 18 Dirt Against the Wind

BOOK V

CHAPTER 19 The Anti-Bismarck

CHAPTER 20 Waiting for Hanoi

CHAPTER 21 1968

CHAPTER 22 The Unlikely Combination

EPILOGUE: A Bildungsroman

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Notes

Sources

Illustration Credits

Index

Preface

Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to “live o’er each scene” with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life…. I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived. And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life…. [I]n every picture there should be shade as well as light.

— BOSWELL, Life of Johnson 1

The task of the biographer, as James Boswell understood, is to enable the reader to see, in her mind’s eye, his subject live. To achieve this, the biographer must know his subject. That means reading all that he wrote as well as much that was written about him. It also means, if the subject is living, not merely interviewing him but getting to know him, as Boswell got to know Johnson: conversing with him, supping with him, even traveling with him. The challenge is, of course, to do so without falling so much under the subject’s influence that the reader ceases to believe the disclaimer that the work is a life, not a panegyric. Boswell, who grew to love Johnson, achieved this feat in two ways: by making explicit Johnson’s boorish manners and slovenly appearance, but also (as Jorge Luis Borges noted) by making himself a figure of fun — a straight man to Johnson’s wit, an overexcitable Scot to Johnson’s dry Englishman. 2My approach has been different.

In addition to the help of all those thanked in the acknowledgments, this author has had one noteworthy advantage over his predecessors: I have had access to Henry Kissinger’s private papers, not only the papers from his time in government, housed at the Library of Congress, but also the private papers donated to Yale University in 2011, which include more than a hundred boxes of personal writings, letters, and diaries dating back to the 1940s. I have also been able to interview the subject of the work on multiple occasions and at considerable length. Not only has this book been written with Henry Kissinger’s cooperation; it was written at his suggestion.

For this reason, I can predict with certainty that hostile reviewers will allege that I have in some way been influenced or induced to paint a falsely flattering picture. This is not the case. Although I was granted access to the Kissinger papers and was given some assistance with the arrangement of interviews with family members and former colleagues, my sole commitment was to make my “best efforts to record [his] life ‘as it actually was’ on the basis of an informed study of the documentary and other evidence available.” This commitment was part of a legal agreement between us, drawn up in 2004, which ended with the following clause:

While the authority of the Work will be enhanced by the extent of the Grantor’s [i.e., Kissinger’s] assistance… it will be enhanced still more by the fact of the Author’s independence; thus, it is understood and agreed that… the Author shall have full editorial control over the final manuscript of the Work, and the Grantor shall have no right to vet, edit, amend or prevent the publication of the finished manuscript of the Work.

The sole exception was that, at Dr. Kissinger’s request, I would not use quotations from his private papers that contained sensitive personal information. I am glad to say that he exercised this right on only a handful of occasions and always in connection with purely personal — and indeed intimate familial — matters.

This book has been just over ten years in the making. Throughout this long endeavor, I believe I have been true to my resolve to write the life of Henry Kissinger “as it actually was”— wie es eigentlich gewesen, in Ranke’s famous phrase (which is perhaps better translated “as it essentially was”). Ranke believed that the historian’s vocation was to infer historical truth from documents — not a dozen documents (the total number cited in one widely read book about Kissinger) but many thousands. I certainly cannot count how many documents I and my research assistant Jason Rockett have looked at in the course of our work. I can count only those that we thought worthy of inclusion in our digital database. The current total of documents is 8,380—a total of 37,645 pages. But these documents are drawn not just from Kissinger’s private and public papers. In all, we have drawn material from 111 archives all around the world, ranging from the major presidential libraries to obscure private collections. (A full list of those consulted for this volume is provided in the sources.) There are of course archives that remain closed and documents that remain classified. However, compared with most periods before and since, the 1970s stand out for the abundance of primary sources. This was the age of the Xerox machine and the audio tape recorder. The former made it easy for institutions to make multiple copies of important documents, increasing the probability that one of them would become accessible to a future historian. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fondness for the latter, combined with the expansion of freedom of information that followed Watergate, ensured that many conversations that might never have found their way into the historical record are now freely available for all to read.