http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0a69b8b8-5c73-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html
September 18, 2015 1:27 pm
‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson
Chris Patten
In his account of a journey from Bavaria to the heart of power in Washington, Niall Ferguson portrays his subject as a man driven by principle more than pragmatism
Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages
The All Souls historian Rohan Butler concluded the first volume of his biography of the French statesman Choiseul with this sentence on page 1,078: “The diplomatic and political career of the Duke of Choiseul had begun.”
Alas, Butler died before he was able to continue the story. We must hope that the same fate does not befall Niall Ferguson, the author of this huge biography of a great international public servant and scholar. Weighing in at close to 1,000 pages, it ends at the moment in 1968 when Henry Kissinger gets his first big job in a Washington administration, as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. The runway to take-off stretches a very long way.
This is not to contest Kissinger’s importance and notoriety in 20th-century history. Now 92, he is one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence. No wonder he appeared 15 times on the cover of Time magazine during his period as national security adviser and then secretary of state. Moreover, he continued to attract celebrity attention for decades after leaving office in 1977. This is partly because of his record in government, which made him the dark darling of conspiracy theorists; the next volume of this biography will presumably cover some of these controversies. Kissinger has also been kept in the spotlight by his regular and authoritative interventions in public debate, which continue to this day.
He offers his views not just as an experienced diplomat but also as a fine historian. This perhaps lured Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard University and a ubiquitous contributor to the written and electronic media — into extensive analysis of and quotation from his subject’s early academic work, as if it all pointed the way inexorably to what he would do when transformed by presidential authority into a policymaker at the heart of the most powerful government in the world. What these passages admittedly do is to remind us that Kissinger’s life is not a value-free zone; he was clearly shaped more by Spinoza and Kant than by Machiavelli.
But we can understand more about Kissinger’s tactics and strategy from what he wrote after his years in office. You learn about his preoccupations as a policymaker, for example, by reading his masterly Diplomacy (1994). This draws significant parallels between the two international systems that have brought the modern world the greatest stability: the Concert of Europe that existed between 1815 and 1914, and the system dominated by the US after the second world war. Today the route to world order is more difficult to discern and navigate.
Kissinger’s personal journey from the industrial town of Fürth in Bavaria, whose Jewish community was terrorised by Nazi gangs, to the “Happy Days Are Here Again” years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New York tells us much about his own values and fortitude. He was initially quite ambivalent about his new home. Writing to a friend in 1939 he noted, as have many other Europeans on their first encounter with the US, that he had to balance things he admired against things he deplored: “Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty. And then this individualism! You stand completely on your own, no one cares about you, you have to make your own way upwards.”
That is exactly what he did, first as a soldier-citizen fighting in Europe, then as one of those who managed the denazification campaign after the war’s end and the discovery in the concentration camps of what Nazism had meant for millions of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities. He explained thoughtfully to his parents why his job should not involve the pursuit of vengeance. It was vital to be fair as well as tough; nor did he lose his profound sense of the centrality of Germany to European civilisation. He had instructed those who worked for him to “lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals”.
Returning to America, Kissinger, like 2m other American servicemen, took advantage of the GI Bill to go to university on a Harvard scholarship — in his case accompanied by a cocker spaniel, Smoky. His peer group was rich in talent that took many of its members to the top in politics, journalism and public service. He majored in government but wrote his immensely long thesis on “The Meaning of History”. Then began the years of hand-to-hand combat common to so many competitive academic careers, where the ferocity of the argument is often in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject.
Kissinger was initially quite ambivalent about the US. ‘Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty,’ he wrote. ‘And then this individualism!’
Like other ambitious academics, Kissinger pitched his tent in “BosWash”, travelling backwards and forwards from Harvard to Washington to give his advice to any who would listen, regardless of their political affiliations. He was deeply hostile to the Soviet Union’s scheme for exerting its power and influence on Europe, for example by its proposal for a reunification of Germany on the basis of that country’s neutrality. He had a deep knowledge of German politics, as well as of the country’s strategic importance to the rest of its continent, and was always inclined to give precedence in his transatlantic travels to Bonn and Berlin, and even Paris, over London.
Ferguson argues that for all Kissinger’s expertise in German affairs, his problem was that he knew more about his country of birth than he did about the country of his citizenship. As late as 1959, the biographer suggests, Kissinger had probably visited fewer than 10 of America’s 50 states. This must have contributed to one of his major blind spots: his inability to understand that the aristocratic Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he hitched his wagon, was increasingly unlikely to attract majority support in a Republican party that was moving at a canter to the right. He was horrified by the rabid intolerance of rightwing Barry Goldwater supporters at the 1964 Republican convention, just as he was later shocked by the antics of the anti-Vietnam war left on university campuses.
Kissinger became notorious for the first time through his writings on the tactics of nuclear warfare, which left him with the unjust reputation of a Dr Strangelove. To be fair to him, he was wrestling with what seemed to many to be the implausible basis of America’s security policy, namely that if its interests or those of an ally such as Germany were seriously threatened then massive nuclear retaliation would be the inevitable response. At an intellectual level it was impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously contemplate visiting Armageddon on the planet if, say, Moscow pushed too hard on Berlin. Kissinger argued that each threat should be dealt with at an appropriate level; the response to a smaller threat could be a smaller nuclear device. But it was not convincing that you could use smaller so-called tactical nuclear weapons without catastrophic consequences. The fallout in every sense could not be contained.
As it happened, it was possible to conduct a policy of flexible response, as President John F Kennedy did, combining credible military threats with imaginative diplomacy to end the Cuban missile crisis without blowing up the world. As for the other crises of the cold war, they were contained by the realisation, in Moscow as in Washington, that mutually assured destruction would follow any attempt to overplay a security hand. The policy was turned suitably enough into the acronym “MAD”, which it was. In recent years, Kissinger has joined other former American foreign policy and security officials to advocate beginning the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Ferguson is particularly convincing in arguing against the popular view that Kissinger is the ultimate pragmatic realist, a polar opposite to those whose ideals shape and infuse their actions. It is of course possible and sensible to be pragmatic at one moment and an idealist the next, according to circumstance. Indeed as Tony Blair’s career demonstrated, it is even possible, if confusing, sometimes to be motivated by both sentiments at the same time. That was the case with the former British prime minister’s arguments for intervention in states that abused their citizens’ human rights. For Ferguson, Kissinger is a mainstream European conservative, moulded by Kant’s realism about humanity and by Burke’s respect for historical forces. “It is the dilemma of conservatism,” Kissinger once wrote, “that it must fight revolution anonymously, by what it is, not by what it says.” Kissinger’s views on how to handle postwar Germany, how to hold at bay Soviet ambitions, and how to articulate American foreign and security policy all had a moral and idealistic as well as a practical core.
As noted earlier, Kissinger’s blind spots included knowledge of American democratic politics, which certainly contributed to his unlikely alliance with Nixon. He had previously worked for both Kennedy and Johnson, in the latter case being led up the garden path by wily Vietnamese diplomacy in the honourable pursuit of a peace deal that would enable the US to escape from a terrible and divisive war. He would have liked to work for a Rockefeller administration, and contributed much good sense to the governor up to and beyond the point at which the billionaire politician’s presidential ambitions were finally sunk. A more cynically ambitious man might have abandoned the Rockefeller ship long before that. And then Nixon — tricky, but pretty clever, Dicky — almost accidentally made him an offer which he could not possibly refuse. The contingent factor in history took another bow.
Nixon shared Kissinger’s admiration for big historical figures. Kissinger himself rather exaggerated, in my view, the geopolitical wisdom of Charles de Gaulle. He was surely correct, like his new master, to see the huge significance of Mao, an appalling tyrant but the leader of a vast country that had held together after the war partly thanks to the ruthlessness of its leadership. China had mighty potential and promise. Nixon probably saw its economic significance more clearly than Kissinger, who never seems quite at home in the world of gross domestic product extrapolations, export figures and demography. The president understood that Vietnam was an appallingly damaging diversion for the US, since capitalism was inevitably going to trump communism and since globalisation would create a different and less polarised world. How best to get out of Vietnam and draw China into a changing global order? These were to be dominant subjects for the partnership of the “odd couple” formed in Washington in 1968.
This is where Ferguson leaves us. His last paragraph tells us that “the time of becoming was over” for Kissinger; “the time of being had at last begun”. The sentiment echoes Rohan Butler on Choiseul. What we can be sure of is that future volumes about “the time of being” will excite a lot more controversy than this one. Kissingerphobes must be counting the days. So next time passions will run much higher; knives will be out; judgment will be reached and simplistically demanded about the career in office of a very remarkable statesman, who like the rest of us (but on a global scale) tried to wrestle with the predicament of what it is to be human.
Lord Patten is chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is a former European commissioner for external relations and was the last governor of Hong Kong
September 18, 2015 1:27 pm
‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson
Chris Patten
In his account of a journey from Bavaria to the heart of power in Washington, Niall Ferguson portrays his subject as a man driven by principle more than pragmatism
Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages
The All Souls historian Rohan Butler concluded the first volume of his biography of the French statesman Choiseul with this sentence on page 1,078: “The diplomatic and political career of the Duke of Choiseul had begun.”
Alas, Butler died before he was able to continue the story. We must hope that the same fate does not befall Niall Ferguson, the author of this huge biography of a great international public servant and scholar. Weighing in at close to 1,000 pages, it ends at the moment in 1968 when Henry Kissinger gets his first big job in a Washington administration, as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. The runway to take-off stretches a very long way.
This is not to contest Kissinger’s importance and notoriety in 20th-century history. Now 92, he is one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence. No wonder he appeared 15 times on the cover of Time magazine during his period as national security adviser and then secretary of state. Moreover, he continued to attract celebrity attention for decades after leaving office in 1977. This is partly because of his record in government, which made him the dark darling of conspiracy theorists; the next volume of this biography will presumably cover some of these controversies. Kissinger has also been kept in the spotlight by his regular and authoritative interventions in public debate, which continue to this day.
He offers his views not just as an experienced diplomat but also as a fine historian. This perhaps lured Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard University and a ubiquitous contributor to the written and electronic media — into extensive analysis of and quotation from his subject’s early academic work, as if it all pointed the way inexorably to what he would do when transformed by presidential authority into a policymaker at the heart of the most powerful government in the world. What these passages admittedly do is to remind us that Kissinger’s life is not a value-free zone; he was clearly shaped more by Spinoza and Kant than by Machiavelli.
But we can understand more about Kissinger’s tactics and strategy from what he wrote after his years in office. You learn about his preoccupations as a policymaker, for example, by reading his masterly Diplomacy (1994). This draws significant parallels between the two international systems that have brought the modern world the greatest stability: the Concert of Europe that existed between 1815 and 1914, and the system dominated by the US after the second world war. Today the route to world order is more difficult to discern and navigate.
Kissinger’s personal journey from the industrial town of Fürth in Bavaria, whose Jewish community was terrorised by Nazi gangs, to the “Happy Days Are Here Again” years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New York tells us much about his own values and fortitude. He was initially quite ambivalent about his new home. Writing to a friend in 1939 he noted, as have many other Europeans on their first encounter with the US, that he had to balance things he admired against things he deplored: “Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty. And then this individualism! You stand completely on your own, no one cares about you, you have to make your own way upwards.”
That is exactly what he did, first as a soldier-citizen fighting in Europe, then as one of those who managed the denazification campaign after the war’s end and the discovery in the concentration camps of what Nazism had meant for millions of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities. He explained thoughtfully to his parents why his job should not involve the pursuit of vengeance. It was vital to be fair as well as tough; nor did he lose his profound sense of the centrality of Germany to European civilisation. He had instructed those who worked for him to “lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals”.
Returning to America, Kissinger, like 2m other American servicemen, took advantage of the GI Bill to go to university on a Harvard scholarship — in his case accompanied by a cocker spaniel, Smoky. His peer group was rich in talent that took many of its members to the top in politics, journalism and public service. He majored in government but wrote his immensely long thesis on “The Meaning of History”. Then began the years of hand-to-hand combat common to so many competitive academic careers, where the ferocity of the argument is often in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject.
Kissinger was initially quite ambivalent about the US. ‘Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty,’ he wrote. ‘And then this individualism!’
Like other ambitious academics, Kissinger pitched his tent in “BosWash”, travelling backwards and forwards from Harvard to Washington to give his advice to any who would listen, regardless of their political affiliations. He was deeply hostile to the Soviet Union’s scheme for exerting its power and influence on Europe, for example by its proposal for a reunification of Germany on the basis of that country’s neutrality. He had a deep knowledge of German politics, as well as of the country’s strategic importance to the rest of its continent, and was always inclined to give precedence in his transatlantic travels to Bonn and Berlin, and even Paris, over London.
Ferguson argues that for all Kissinger’s expertise in German affairs, his problem was that he knew more about his country of birth than he did about the country of his citizenship. As late as 1959, the biographer suggests, Kissinger had probably visited fewer than 10 of America’s 50 states. This must have contributed to one of his major blind spots: his inability to understand that the aristocratic Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he hitched his wagon, was increasingly unlikely to attract majority support in a Republican party that was moving at a canter to the right. He was horrified by the rabid intolerance of rightwing Barry Goldwater supporters at the 1964 Republican convention, just as he was later shocked by the antics of the anti-Vietnam war left on university campuses.
Kissinger became notorious for the first time through his writings on the tactics of nuclear warfare, which left him with the unjust reputation of a Dr Strangelove. To be fair to him, he was wrestling with what seemed to many to be the implausible basis of America’s security policy, namely that if its interests or those of an ally such as Germany were seriously threatened then massive nuclear retaliation would be the inevitable response. At an intellectual level it was impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously contemplate visiting Armageddon on the planet if, say, Moscow pushed too hard on Berlin. Kissinger argued that each threat should be dealt with at an appropriate level; the response to a smaller threat could be a smaller nuclear device. But it was not convincing that you could use smaller so-called tactical nuclear weapons without catastrophic consequences. The fallout in every sense could not be contained.
As it happened, it was possible to conduct a policy of flexible response, as President John F Kennedy did, combining credible military threats with imaginative diplomacy to end the Cuban missile crisis without blowing up the world. As for the other crises of the cold war, they were contained by the realisation, in Moscow as in Washington, that mutually assured destruction would follow any attempt to overplay a security hand. The policy was turned suitably enough into the acronym “MAD”, which it was. In recent years, Kissinger has joined other former American foreign policy and security officials to advocate beginning the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
Ferguson is particularly convincing in arguing against the popular view that Kissinger is the ultimate pragmatic realist, a polar opposite to those whose ideals shape and infuse their actions. It is of course possible and sensible to be pragmatic at one moment and an idealist the next, according to circumstance. Indeed as Tony Blair’s career demonstrated, it is even possible, if confusing, sometimes to be motivated by both sentiments at the same time. That was the case with the former British prime minister’s arguments for intervention in states that abused their citizens’ human rights. For Ferguson, Kissinger is a mainstream European conservative, moulded by Kant’s realism about humanity and by Burke’s respect for historical forces. “It is the dilemma of conservatism,” Kissinger once wrote, “that it must fight revolution anonymously, by what it is, not by what it says.” Kissinger’s views on how to handle postwar Germany, how to hold at bay Soviet ambitions, and how to articulate American foreign and security policy all had a moral and idealistic as well as a practical core.
As noted earlier, Kissinger’s blind spots included knowledge of American democratic politics, which certainly contributed to his unlikely alliance with Nixon. He had previously worked for both Kennedy and Johnson, in the latter case being led up the garden path by wily Vietnamese diplomacy in the honourable pursuit of a peace deal that would enable the US to escape from a terrible and divisive war. He would have liked to work for a Rockefeller administration, and contributed much good sense to the governor up to and beyond the point at which the billionaire politician’s presidential ambitions were finally sunk. A more cynically ambitious man might have abandoned the Rockefeller ship long before that. And then Nixon — tricky, but pretty clever, Dicky — almost accidentally made him an offer which he could not possibly refuse. The contingent factor in history took another bow.
Nixon shared Kissinger’s admiration for big historical figures. Kissinger himself rather exaggerated, in my view, the geopolitical wisdom of Charles de Gaulle. He was surely correct, like his new master, to see the huge significance of Mao, an appalling tyrant but the leader of a vast country that had held together after the war partly thanks to the ruthlessness of its leadership. China had mighty potential and promise. Nixon probably saw its economic significance more clearly than Kissinger, who never seems quite at home in the world of gross domestic product extrapolations, export figures and demography. The president understood that Vietnam was an appallingly damaging diversion for the US, since capitalism was inevitably going to trump communism and since globalisation would create a different and less polarised world. How best to get out of Vietnam and draw China into a changing global order? These were to be dominant subjects for the partnership of the “odd couple” formed in Washington in 1968.
This is where Ferguson leaves us. His last paragraph tells us that “the time of becoming was over” for Kissinger; “the time of being had at last begun”. The sentiment echoes Rohan Butler on Choiseul. What we can be sure of is that future volumes about “the time of being” will excite a lot more controversy than this one. Kissingerphobes must be counting the days. So next time passions will run much higher; knives will be out; judgment will be reached and simplistically demanded about the career in office of a very remarkable statesman, who like the rest of us (but on a global scale) tried to wrestle with the predicament of what it is to be human.
Lord Patten is chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is a former European commissioner for external relations and was the last governor of Hong Kong
