Henry never had an unpublished thought.
In studying Kissinger, I have attempted to gain an insight into a personality in power, a brilliant man who thought seriously and with great insight about the foreign policy issues of the time, but who was prone to deception and intrigue, highly skilled at bureaucratic infighting, and given to the ingratiating and fawning praise of the president as the source of his power. Kissinger was also a genius at self-promotion, becoming a celebrity diplomat, a man whose activities were chronicled in the entertainment and society pages as well as in the news sections. He was indeed larger than life, negatively as well as positively.
In the mid-1970s he ranked as the most admired American, enjoying close to universal acclaim.
During the Carter administration, Kissinger played the role of a shadow secretary of state, enjoying great influence, because the perception was that he would likely be back in power soon.
This is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. To fully understand Kissinger, it is important to see him as a political actor, a politician, and a man who understood that American foreign policy is fundamentally shaped and determined by the struggles and battles of American domestic politics.
“Kissinger was said to have a taste for stardom, that he was a foreign policy prima donna, but I believe his taste was for politics. He his a politician, above all else. He calculates like a politician.” Kissinger sought political power for reasons of personal ambition, to enact his preferred policies, and to defend his perception of America’s national interest.
As unpleasant as it is to think that decisions about war and peace might be influenced by electoral considerations, it is better to recognize and accept it as the reality of our flawed but still democratic and pluralist republic. From a president’s point of view, the best foreign policy for the country is useless if he is not elected or reelected to implement it.
“Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such universal acclamation.”
“Best appointment so far.”
“We’ll all sleep a little better each night knowing Henry is down there.”
Kissinger recalled that “the deepest impact” of his early life in Germany and his immigration to the US was that “all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed and many of the people that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities. So in this case it was a rather unsettling experience.”
It does not take Sigmund Freud to recognize that these experiences may have shaped or accentuated certain characteristics, such as Kissinger’s legendary insecurity, paranoia, and extreme sensitivity to criticism. His intellectual emphasis on stability and equilibrium in international relations, and his fears about revolution and disorder, were natural outgrowth of a youth violently interrupted. The collapse of his gentle father in the face of Nazi persecution contributed to Kissinger’s own sense that not only do the meek not inherit the earth, but that power is the ultimate arbiter in both life and international relations. “Good will won’t help you defend yourself on the docks of Marseilles.”
While he admired “American technology, the American tempo of work, American freedom,” he shared a common European feeling about the superficiality of Americans. They took a “casual approach to life,” Kissinger wrote, and “no youth of my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with.”
His roommates at Lafayette recalled him as the “brainiest of a very intelligent class.” “He didn’t read books. He ate them, with his eyes, his fingers, with his squirming in the chair or bed, and with his mumbling criticism.”
Kissinger later eulogized Kraemer as “the greatest single influence on my formative years,” praising him for dedicating “his life to fighting against the expedient over the principled.”
Kissinger also expressed a raw sentiment that many came to share when confronted by the camps: “This is humanity in the 20th century.”
To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between. The real tragedies in life are not choices between right and wrong. Real difficulties bare difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t begin to comprehend.
“Helmut is a man. He has seen more than most people in a life time.” Kissinger went on to explain that the camps were “testing grounds,” where men “fought for survival” under the worst possible circumstances. “The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance.” Survival required “a singleness of purpose inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States. Such singleness of purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values, it had to disregard ordinary standards of morality. One could only survive through lies, tricks and somehow acquiring enough food to fill one’s belly.” Kissinger closed the letter with a telling statement: “They have seen man from the most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious?”
It is not difficult to detect in these letters aspects of Kissinger’s later approach to international affairs, particularly his belief that the statesman could not be held to “ordinary standards of morality” in the struggle between nations.
Roommates remembered Kissinger sitting in an overstuffed chair, reading at all hours of the day and night, biting his nails bloody. One recalled that Henry “worked harder, studied more… read till 1 or 2 am, had tremendous drive and discipline… he was absorbing everything.”
Elliott, as another student remembered, was “impressed to the gills.” It marked the beginning of an important relationship in Kissinger’s career. Elliott became a near tireless promoter of Kissinger, describing him as “more like a mature colleague than a student” and “a combination of Kant and Spinoza.” Elliott’s high praise for Kissinger’s “depth and philosophical insight” was sometimes mixed with disparaging references to his mind’s “lack of grace” and “Teutonic” thoroughness, but Elliott recognized Kissinger’s potential and was remarkably unselfish in opening up numerous opportunities for his prized student.
In fact, Kissinger rejected what he perceived as Spengler’s and Toynbee’s historical determinism, along with their belief that history operated with “laws” similar to the natural world, which could be ascertained through empirical research. Kissinger was far more attracted to Kant’s moral philosophy and its famous “categorical imperative … the general formulation of which enjoins men to act according to those maxims which can at the same time be mad into a universal law.” Kissinger agreed with Kant that man had the freedom to shape his own history. But he did not draw Kant’s optimistic conclusions from this assumption. In an idiosyncratic reading of Kant, he argued that the German philosopher’s work Perpetual Peace, which maintained that “mankind was progressing slowly but surely in the right direction” toward universal peace with a league of free republics, undermined Kant’s own argument against determinism.
Kissinger regarded much of history as the story of tragedy, something that Americans, in their optimistic national creed, had difficulty understanding and accepting. In the end, according to the historian Peter Dickson, Kissinger’s own personal “philosophy of history” was “a curious amalgamation of ethical relativism and antimaterialism,” in which “man must create his own meaning, his own values, and his own reality.”
Niall Ferguson has called the work “an exercise in academic exhibitionism,” an undergraduate’s showing off all that he has learned rather than a sustained original academic work. The thesis, while containing many interesting historical formulations and impressive in its scale and sheer hubris, is designed to impress a favored mentor, not to offer a profound insight into the author’s soul or his future.
Elliott was poised to take advantage of this change. He believed that the attack in Korea was a “testing of the civilization of the West … clearly and brutally” thrust upon the US and it allies. Kissinger shared his mentor’s viewpoint, arguing in even stronger terms, “The stark fact of the situation is, however, that Soviet expansionism is directed against our existence, not our policies.”
Among the more than 600 elite participants would be some who in the future became presidents and PMs of France, Japan, Belgium, Malaysia, and Turkey, as well as influential academics, artists, journalists, publishers, and corporate officials.
Even if it is denied, the significance of this period remains in the fact that it was faced with the construction of a new international order and therefore with all the dilemmas of foreign policy in their most immediate form: the relationship between domestic and international legitimacy, the role of the balance of power, the limit of statesmanship.
Kissinger dedicated his work to Elliott, to whom he owed, he said, “more, both intellectually and humanly, than I can ever repay.”
The leaders of his work were great individuals who acted to change history, statesmen who understood the limits of political action but had exercised their creativity and insight to provide a “structure of peace” in their time. Kissinger portrayed a heroic and even idealistic model of statesmanship, a great distance from the complicated and messy choices of the flawed but very human figures of Metternich and Castlereagh.
In his dissertation Kissinger wrote, “Luck, in politics as in other activities, is but the residue of design.” At this low point in his life, Kissinger got lucky.
Kissinger was rarely humble about his abilities, but even he admitted to Oppenheimer that “I find myself somewhat overawed by the enormity of the subject.” Kissinger would now be dealing directly with many of the key leaders he aspired to impress and influence.
Rockefeller was the wealthy American aristocrat, an eternal optimist with an outgoing, warm personality, while Kissinger was the brooding intellectual, cold in his personal relationships and personally insecure to the point of paranoia. Kissinger worked hard at the courtship, seeing the Rockefeller family as the nearest equivalent to “the function of a good aristocracy.” Rockefeller came to see in Kissinger “the combination of brilliance and egotism” he found so appealing.
It was an early lesson for Kissinger in the bureaucratic battles that frequently shaped American foreign policy. Kissinger immediately wrote to “Nelson,” saying, “It has been both a comfort and an inspiration to know of your presence in the Government, and of your willingness to stand up for what you thought important without considering what might be administratively easiest.” Kissinger assured him, “Time will vindicate what you have stood for.”
Rockefeller described the Special Studies Project as an attempt to “define the major problems and opportunities facing the US and clarify national purposes and objectives, and to develop principles which could serve as the basis of future national policy.” The project was the equivalent of a modern-day political think tank.
The project was an enormous undertaking for the young professor, still tasked with finishing the Council on Foreign Relations’ book on nuclear weapons and getting his dissertation published. In running this project, which involved a multitude of contributors, endless meetings, and very complex politics, Kissinger reflected, “We really do lead a bureaucratized life in this country in which the internal workings of whatever machine we are caught up in are more complicated than the problems for which the machine was designed in the first place” — a comment he would later make about the foreign policy bureaucracy when he became NSA.
“American response to the Hungarian uprising seems to me to indicate a moral weakness rather than an analytical one on that part of the free world.” America needed a strong sense of purpose to compete against the “Messianic movement” of Soviet communism. Kissinger feared that America was too bound by “bureaucratic rationality” and lacked a sense of mission, without which “it is impossible to achieve great things.”
At the risk of being blasphemous, one might say that if Christ had been advised by a policy planning staff, he would never have mounted the Cross.
When the Soviet Union stunned the world by launching the first man-made satellite on October 4, 1957, however, the psychological impact on the US was extraordinary. The sudden sense of vulnerability and fear made the country extremely receptive to new ideas about national security.
When Rockefeller appeared on the Today show to discuss the report, the host, Dave Garroway, told viewers that anyone interested in a copy could get one by writing to the show. No one expected that the next day there would be 45,000 requests; the report went like “hot cakes.” There were 200,000 more requests the day after that.
Kissinger’s deftness at handling the relationships, egos, and rivalries of the corporate, legal, and governmental officials he worked with at the Council on Foreign Relations and on the Special Studies Project contrasts sharply with the problems he had with academic colleagues, where his fierce ambition, abrasive personality, and conspicuous networking inspired intense animosity and lingering resentments.
The US cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half. 15 years more of a deterioration of our position in the world such as we have experienced in WW2 would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant. Our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.
In effect, The Necessity for Choice was something of a job application, and Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer.
Between 1961 and 1968, Kissinger learned about how Washington operated and became increasingly involved in significant issues, especially those related to Germany and Vietnam. Although he experienced considerable frustration, Kissinger cultivated the right people and developed a reputation for competence and discretion that made him, by the end of 1968, the leading candidate for a major foreign policy position, no matter who won the White House.
Bundy, a brilliant man of almost Puritan reserve, was put off by Kissinger’s flattery and distrusted him. Kissinger suggested that Bundy disliked him, at least in part, because he was both foreign and Jewish, writing that Bundy “tended to treat [him] with the combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively intense personal style.”
Noting that the chancellor had experienced the collapse of Imperial Germany, the overthrow of Weimar, and the “total disintegration of Germany,” Kissinger wrote, “To an extend hard to understand for an American, he is conscious of, perhaps obsessed by, the possibility of tragedy.” Kissinger observed, “The chief lesson he has drawn from that history is that moderation and a sense of proportion are not a forte of the Germans. I agree with him.” This “distrust of his compatriots” helped explain Adenauer’s “rigidity.”
The communist decision on August 13, 1961, to build a wall and stop the population exodus from East Berlin caught the US by surprise but brought a temporary relief to the Kennedy administration. Kennedy had insisted only on maintaining the status of West Berlin and was reputed to have said, “A wall is helluva lot better than a war.”
By this point, however, Kissinger found himself in Washington simply reading cables, writing memos, and getting no response from Bundy. He felt his “contribution to Berlin planning is that of a kibitzer shouting random comments from the sidelines.” Kissinger cleaned out his desk and left Washington shortly afterward, writing a long letter to Schlesinger to explain “the frustration and despair” that led to his decision.
While Kennedy’s assassination was a profound psychological shock to the country and placed the martyred young president in the pantheon of American heroes, Kissinger did not share the assessment. He told colleagues that Kennedy had been “leading the country to disaster.” Kissinger’s own personal life was a disaster at the time, as he divorced his wife, leaving her with two children under the age of five.
His briefings in Washington before he left introduced Kissinger to the confusion and chaos in Vietnam policy, with official optimism mixed with unofficial cynicism about the war effort. One Pentagon official told him bluntly, “At some point on this road we will have to cut the balls off the people we are now supporting in Vietnam, and if you want to do a really constructive study you ought to address yourself to the question of how we can cut their balls off.” Kissinger wrote in his diary, “How does one convince a people that one is prepared to stay indefinitely 10,000 miles away against opponents who are fighting in their own country?”
They also warned Kissinger that the “Vietnamese were not easy to deal with.” When Kissinger responded that the South Vietnamese government showed great skill in pursuing its interests and was anything “but an American tool,” his Soviet counterpart replied, “And you have 500K troops in South Vietnam. You can imagine the limits of our influence in Hanoi.”
“We were now paying the price for two centuries of debunking. It was great fun to show the weakness of every philosophy and institution as long as there was a great capital of belief to draw on. But now this capital has been exhausted. The task is to restore a moral dimension together with a sense of the complexity of events.” Kissinger’s concern about America’s moral crisis even found expression when he reviewed a book on the Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies and concluded that they were a “warning of what may happen if society neglects the inner being or if man loses faith in his future.”
Whether they were conservatives or liberals, each one felt that Kissinger understood their point of view and may have been sympathetic with it. This was a tribute to Kissinger’s brilliance as well as his deviousness.
Although the two men shared a professional love for foreign policy, and had a sense of themselves as outsiders not fully accepted by the elites, they were also possessed of markedly different temperaments and backgrounds. Nixon was from a lower-middle-class, Californians, Quaker background, and resented the Eastern Establishment, liberal Jews, and Ivy League intellectuals. He was, despite being the in the most public of professions, a loner who hated confrontation with others and brooded over real and imagined slights. Kissinger was more gregarious than Nixon, enjoyed dealing with the media and people of different views, and was confident of his own intellectual superiority.
Like his great rival John Kennedy and in sharp contrast to his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon believed that a president should focus on foreign policy, once saying, “This country could run itself domestically without a President,” and joking that domestic policy amounted to “building outhouses in Peoria.”
Nixon later wrote, “The problems we confronted were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do to change them that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.” While this was unlikely, it reflects Nixon’s frustration at the midpoint of his first term. Even Kissinger, with his irreverent sense of humor, recognized that things had not gone their way. When a brief crisis erupted in Jordan in September 1970, and the US successfully backed King Hussein’s effort to secure his regime, Kissinger joked to one reporter that the administration’s new motto would be “You can’t lose them all.” Kissinger’s joke stood in sharp contrast with the energy and confidence that both men possessed when they began their work together in January 1969.
Kissinger attacked his new job with a sustained energy and enthusiasm, but also made sure to court the media. A cover story in Time magazine in early February 1969 described Kissinger “working six days a week from 7:30am to near midnight” and engaging the brutal pace of government, which led him half-jokingly to say he didn’t want to confront any more new ideas because he was living off his “intellectual capital.” “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
Rogers embodied “the amateur approach to his job. He dislikes working over-long hours and is reluctant to deal with official business than in his office or on the platform.”
Although Nixon also stressed that a rapid American withdrawal would have “disastrous” effects in Asia, the president tended to emphasize the domestic effects: “The most serious effect would be in the US. When a great power fails, it deeply affects the will of the people. While the public would welcome peace initially, they would soon be asking why we pulled out and this would in turn lead to an attack on the leadership and establishment and the US role in the war.” Nixon believed that a rapid withdrawal, with a likely collapse of Saigon and victory for the North Vietnamese, would cause an intense political crisis within the US. Critics would rightly ask, What was the sacrifice in American blood and treasure for? Why did my father or son or brother have to die? Who was responsible for this failure? Nixon believed this would destroy his capacity to govern. He shared the sentiment that Kissinger’s mentor, Fritz Kraemer, penned in a memo Kissinger forwarded to the president: “The ‘people’ are not very just, they forgive the victor, but always make scapegoats for their own leaders who are not victorious.”
Nixon recognized that even though many Americans in 1953 had regarded the end to the Korean War as a “defeat,” that the outcome had freed Eisenhower to devote his attention to more important issues, such as organizing NATO and quieting the McCarty furor over domestic communism. Similarly, Nixon wanted to restore America’s leadership over the European allies and quiet the antiwar protests at home. For Nixon, getting a Korean-like result in South Vietnam would be the best outcome the US could achieve.
Kissinger’s praise echoed the type of critique he had often written about how American leaders dealt with Europe, but his advice would soon encounter the reality of a Europe turning inward and not receptive to a renewal of a 1950s Eisenhower-style American leadership.
Two weeks before the Korean incident, Eisenhower died. Nixon, informed of the news, uncharacteristically broke down and wept openly in front of a group of his aides, including Kissinger, Haldeman, and Rogers. “He was such a strong man,” Nixon said. Nixon hoped to begin his presidency following Eisenhower’s example. The North Korean action made clear, however, that the world Nixon inherited was not that of the 34th president. The US no longer enjoyed the overwhelming military and economic power it had when Eisenhower became president.
It was a painful decision for Nixon, running against his own self-image as a leader unafraid to buck the public opinion polls.
Nixon and Kissinger overestimated both Moscow’s ability and its willingness to try to influence Hanoi. The Russian competed with the Chinese for influence with North Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese skillfully manipulated the two communist superpowers for their own interest.
To allow government policy to be made in the streets would destroy the democratic process. It would invite anarchy.
The appearance of power is therefore almost as important as the reality of it; in fact, the appearance is frequently its essential reality.
Kissinger’s swinger image may have, as Safire put it, reassured Americans that “their national security was in the hands of red-blooded American boy,” as well as helped Kissinger within the hypermasculine culture of Nixon White House.
Henry was changing, gaining confidence, feeling his oats, expanding his authority, stepping on toes. Nixon observed all this, shook his head admiringly, and said, “Henry plays the game hard, all right.”
Nixon’s overheated rhetoric may have come from his frustration with not taking action over the EC-121 that was shot down and backing away from Operation Duck Hook. Encouraged by Kissinger, he believed that the Communists saw him as weak and indecisive and that he needed to change that perception.
***You’re tearing the country apart domestically. And this would have long-term consequences for foreign policy as tomorrow’s foreign policy is based on today’s domestic situation.
Communist leaders believe in Lenin’s precept: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.
Nixon had “reluctantly concluded that our entire effort on the public relations front has been misdirected and ineffective.” What was needed in Nixon’s view was “to get across those fundamental decencies and virtues which the great majority of Americans like — hard work, warmth, kindness, consideration for others, willingness to take the heat and not to pass the buck and, above all, a man who always does what he thinks is right, regardless of the consequences.”
Nixon recognized how important success in foreign policy, and getting the credit for that success, would be for his reelection. The best bet for those political benefits was Kissinger. He was now, as Haldeman told Kissinger, “indispensable to the President, and both he and the President know it, and he’s got to stay here.”
Kissinger’s ascendancy owed much to his bureaucratic maneuvering, his skill with the media, and his relationship with Nixon. It also stemmed from his ability to discuss foreign policy in new ways, and his language of retrenchment and realism was perfectly coordinated with the political mood of the nation. In year-end briefings for the press, Kissinger used the language of realism to discuss foreign policy. “It is really our interests that should get us involved, not our commitments.” America needed a debate “on what and where are our interests, and only then should we look at our commitments.” Kissinger understood the real limits of American power. He told the journalists of his occasional frustration that “one of the great dangers with trying to deal with such a high number of issues and problems is that the urgent ones seem to displace the more important ones. It is a constant fight to find time to address those questions which have long range implications.”
“The scary part of it is that he really is a nice man. He sees himself as the conscience of the Administration.” Kissinger denied using that exact expression, telling Dan Rather, “My megalomania takes extreme forms but not quite that.”
“We have to make fundamental decisions.” Faced with the continuing drain of Vietnam on his presidency and fearing its impact on his reelection prospects, feeling besieged and without supporters, Nixon freely vented his anger to Kissinger. The next day he told Kissinger and Haldeman that he would never forget their loyalty to him and that they had stood up when no one else, especially in his cabinet, had done so.
In foreign policy the most intractable problems are those where both sides are right.
The key was the political impact of SALT, and the importance of the president receiving the political benefits from it.
Kissinger reinforced Nixon’s feelings by adding that in the “history books,” it would not really matter who did what to get the agreement and that the important things was that the president got the “personal credit.”
By the end of the two-day visit, however, Kissinger described the talks in enthusiastic terms to Nixon as “the most searching, sweeping and significant discussions I have ever had in government.” For a man who prided himself on being “cold-blooded” and realistic in his understanding of international politics and foreign personalities, Kissinger wrote of the visit as “a very moving experience,” which left an “indelible impression on me and my colleagues.” The discussions with Zhou “had all the flavor, texture, variety and delicacy of a Chinese banquet.” He assured Nixon that he and Zhou “have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history,” and that if the US could handle its dealings with the Chinese with “reliability, precision, and finesse, we will have made a revolution.”
Schlesinger found Kissinger still “enchanted” with the Chinese, whom he found “less doctrinaire” and “more idealistic” than the Russian, and possessed of an “elegance of manners.” Although he could never understand a young militant dedicating himself to the “dreary and sterile” Soviet Union, Kissinger told Schlesinger, “I could fully understand it if someone decided to dedicate himself to Communist China.” Kissinger was also taken with the elegant Zhou, whom he would later say was one of the most impressive public figures he had ever met.
America’s role in policing Japan’s power remained important, and Kissinger implied that without the US, Japan might become threatening toward China.
At the hight of a brilliant career, he enjoys a global spotlight and an influence that most professors only read about in libraries.
Along with other accolades, including a description of Kissinger as the “second most powerful man in the world,” the article quoted Dan Rather describing Kissinger as “the best briefer in Washington,” adding that Kissinger “has the reputation that he never lies.”
Met with a Washington response that Blood described as a “deafening silence,” he and his fellow diplomats vigorously protested what they perceived as a policy of “moral bankruptcy” in its failure to denounce the atrocities of intervene against “genocide.”
The President has a special feeling for President Yahya. Once cannot make policy on that basis, but it is a fact of life.
The thing that concerns the President and me is this: here we have Indian-Soviet collusion, raping a friend of ours. Secondly, we have a situation where one of the motives that the Chinese may have had in leaning towards us a little bit is the fear that something like this might happen to them.
Ironically, the Soviet then attacked Pakistan’s repression and defended self-determination, in this case the idea of “a political settlement in East Pakistan on the basis of respect for the will of the population.” This ideological confusion — the Soviets supporting Indian democracy while the US backed a Pakistani dictatorship — was not lost in the American’s portrayal of the war, rendering the position of Nixon and Kissinger even more tenuous.
At this point a decidedly surreal aspect entered the Nixon-Kissinger conversations. Both men wanted to come off as tough and masculine, and they exaggerated the stakes of their decisions wholly out of proportion to the actual situation developing on the ground in South Asia.
Now we really get into the number game. You’ve got the Soviet Union with 800M Chinese, 600M Indians, the balance of Southeast Asia terrorized, the Japanese immobile, the Europeans, of course will suck after them, and the US the only one, we have maybe part of Latin America and who knows.
Kissinger continued to try to manage the American response from the Azores, but his emotional behavior on the trip, especially his open resentment toward Rogers and shouting at Haig on the phone, got Nixon’s attention.
Nixon suggested that Kissinger should ignore his press critic. He lamented, “Henry thinks the whole world thinks that he’s failed, and that we’ve failed, and so fort. That’s bullshit.” More important, Nixon said, the American people just did not care about South Asia. Ehrlichman speculated that Kissinger was “interested in what Marquis Childs writes, and what Joe Kraft writes, and what Reston thinks” because these reporters were “Henry’s world. Those are the people because he has no family, no personal life, so that’s his cosmos.”
Compared to the dull life of President Nixon, who was “watching TV with Bebe Rebozo,” Kissinger “sneaks into Paris in dark glasses and false whiskers ready to play bloody chess with cunning men from Asia and, afterward, to dine well with a lovely woman.” Red-blooded American boys looking about for a hero must find his life irresistible.
If the ARVN collapses a lot of other things will collapse around here. If they were going to collapse, they had to go a year ago. We can’t do it this year, Henry. We’re playing a much bigger game. We’re playing a Russian game, a Chinese game, an election game.
Kissinger’s extraordinary energy and stamina, along with his almost unlimited access to Nixon, placed him at the center of both military and diplomatic decision-making.
Kissinger believed the difficulties of Brezhnev’s domestic position, commenting, “We may have an election in November; he acts as if he has one next week and every week thereafter.”
Brezhnev faced the objections of strong rivals like Nikolai Podgorny, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and his ally Petro Shelest, the Ukrainian party leader, as well as the military leadership under Marshal Andrei Grechko. Brezhnev was “a walking bundle of nerves, popping in and out of the room, smoking one cigarette after another.” For Brezhnev, as for Nixon in a different manner, foreign policy was ultimately about domestic legitimacy, and promoting his image as a peacemaker was as essential to the Soviet leader as it was to his American counterpart.
Amid the extensive praise for the president’s triumph, with its clear political overtones, it was also clear how important Kissinger was to this image of success. Kissinger played a decisive role in briefing reporters about the agreement. John Osborne described how Kissinger “labored with all the eloquence and brilliance at his command, along with a dash of sardonic humor, to minimize the vulnerabilities.”
Kissinger was now, as Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Sun-Times put it, “a legend,” a diplomat who was “the compleat cosmopolitan, urbane without swagger, self-centered without smugness.” He was now “a global superstar, the first and thus far only celebrity diplomat of the media age.” His masterful press briefings during the summit had journalists searching for more superlatives.
Kissinger was more optimistic about the negotiations than Nixon, while Nixon worried more about raising expectations among voters within the US each time Kissinger met with the North Vietnamese in Paris, as disillusionment could be harmful politically — a lesson learned from the 1968 election.
Nixon surely realized that McGovern’s Vietnam plan was asking so much less from the North Vietnamese than they now indicated the were prepared to grant to Nixon, and that Kissinger’s deal was not only another foreign policy success but also the final nail in the coffin of McGovern’s candidacy.
Kissinger’s deputy, Al Haig, suspected this insecurity. A decorated Vietnam combat veteran, Haig had advanced in rank rapidly within the Nixon White House, and Nixon admired Haig’s physical courage and liked his blunt manner and loyalty. Haig’s organizational abilities and military efficiency contrasted with Kissinger’s lack of attention to such matters and kept the NSC functioning smoothly.
Two meetings with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci led Kissinger to a number of statements he would deeply regret, including his comment that the key to his “movie star status” arose “from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.”
Haig was reluctant to press the issue to the point of an open break, commenting, “To have done so would have hardened his position and confronted him with a test of manhood in front of his advisers that he could not have gone back from.”
Kissinger describes Nixon as “ensconced at Camp David, surrounded only by his public relations experts,… deep in the bog of resentments that had produced the darkest and perhaps most malevolent frame of mind of his presidency.”
Without a deadline like Election Day, the North Vietnamese reverted to their “normal negotiating habit” of delay after delay. “They’re shits,” Kissinger exclaimed, “tawdry, miserable, filthy people. They make the Russians look good.”
It’s painful for me, but if you don’t do this, it will be like the EC-121. Mr. President, if you don’t do this, then you’ll really be impotent.
He must try to be effective rather than brilliant.
“the object of daily grief,” “appears to have lost his senses,” “stone-age tactic,” “terror bombing in the name of peace,” “war by tantrum,” “shame on earth,” “crime against humanity.”
The intensity of the criticism had its impact on both men. Colson recalled that Nixon “got less and less sleep as he took the full weight of the criticism. I saw him aging before my eyes.”
Nixon supplying power and will, Kissinger an intellectual framework and negotiating skills.
Although Kissinger had enjoyed the “trifecta” success of the first Nixon term, the heights of celebrity and fame he now enjoyed were unprecedented. Congressman Bingham even proposed a constitutional amendment to allow the foreign-born Kissinger to run for president. How had this happened? How had Kissinger become, in effect, the “president for foreign policy”?
Nixon remained angry and defiant over media coverage of the Vietnam settlement, bitter about the criticism of his “terror bombing” and the suggestion that he was suggesting like a crazy man.
He made sure to indicate his own personal “anguish” and described the bombing as a “very painful thing.” This conciliatory strategy seemed to work. Time proclaimed, “Kissinger is back on top now with his darkest days behind him.”
Kissinger and the members of his staff took a brief walk in Hanoi before their meeting, but when they returned to their guesthouse, the guards refused to allow Kissinger in. The North Vietnamese guard had never heard of the famous diplomat.
They “cannot have their aid and eat Indochina too.”
Kissinger was a master of fuzzy language.
When an inebriated Nixon lamented having to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman and told Kissinger that instead he considered “throwing myself on the sword and letting Agnew take it,” Kissinger responded immediately: “That is out of the question,” and “I don’t think the President has the right to sacrifice himself for an individual.” Their conversation now reflected the subtle shift in their positions of power, with Kissinger assuming the stronger position.
Unfortunately for Nixon, the strategy backfired, as Kissinger’s foreign policy activism simply reinforced the perception that he was the real brains behind Nixon’s diplomacy.
If we didn’t have this god damn domestic situation, a week of bombing would put them … this Agreement in force.
We can’t threaten them now.
He also asked for an unscheduled late-night meeting with Nixon and Kissinger to insist that the Soviet Union and US impose a peace settlement in the Middle East before another war broke out. Kissinger — who angrily noted in his own memo of the meeting, “Typical of Soviets to spring on us at last moment without any preparation” — should have realized that the contrast between his public presentation of superpower harmony and the true state of affairs was a recipe for eventual public disillusionment.
When told that the regime was allowing the press access, Kissinger cynically remarked, “That demonstrates the total naivete of the new government. If they think the press has any interest in the truth, they’re mistaken. All they will want to do is horror studies.”
In the aftermath of Vietnam, however, Kissinger’s view was that American foreign policy needed to be realistic, and even ruthless, in its willingness to ally with unsavory regimes to resist Soviet inroads.
Now that he was in charge of the process, Kissinger was determined to settle the conflict in a way that reduced Soviet influence without impairing detente, the diplomatic equivalent of threading the needle.
Kissinger, with a mixture of self-pity and blackmail, told Dinitz, “Our whole foreign policy position depends on our not being represented as having screwed up a crisis, and with all affection for Israel, if it turns out that we are going to be under attack for mismanagement in a crisis, we will have to turn on you.” Continued success and the perception of highly skilled diplomacy were central to Kissinger’s elevated public image, and he feared they could be undermined by any suggestion that the Nixon administration — or he personally — had “screwed up” on the Middle East. It was the epitome of the personalization of foreign policy that Kissinger had come to promote.
Nixon sent Kissinger to Moscow with a grant of full authority to negotiate with the Soviets; however, Nixon also informed the Soviets of this, which “horrified” Kissinger, since it “deprived him of any capacity to stall.”
Look, Mr. Ambassador, we have been a strong support for you, but we cannot make Brezhnev look like a goddam fool in front of his colleagues.
“We have come out of this in the catbird seat. Everyone has to come to us since we are the only ones who can deliver.” The Israelis, he said, learned that they could not fight a war without “an open US supply line,” and while Arabs “may despise us, or hate us,” if they wanted a settlement, the US is “the essential ingredient.”
When Nixon mentioned his desire to hold a press conference the next day, Kissinger encouraged Nixon to “treat the bastards with contempt,” and, in an unusual reference to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, reminded Nixon, “You were prepared to put forces in as you were prepared to go to nuclear war in Pakistan and that was way before you knew what was going to happen.”
Kissinger called Haig right after the news conference ended and said, “The crazy bastard really made a mess with the Russians,” stressing the contrast with his own approach of downplaying the confrontation. “He has turned it into a massive Soviet backdown,” Kissinger added, with a public humiliation of Brezhnev. Kissinger asked Haig to call Dobrynin to try to soften Nixon’s remarks, but added that Nixon “looked awful.”
The Yom Kippur war had exposed the sharpest divisions within the West since the Suez crisis of the 1950s. Most European nations refused to allow American planes to use their facilities for the massive American airlift to Israel. Heavily dependent on imported oil, the European nations and Japan, led by France and its foreign minister, adopted a strong pro-Arab position, demanding Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders. The American nuclear alert also took Europe by surprise, and their vociferous complaint about a lack of consultation rang through the foreign offices. The postwar Western alliance, America’s greatest foreign policy success, was coming unglued.
Kissinger approached this combination of crises and dilemmas with extraordinary energy, intelligence, and guile. David Bruce, one of America’s patrician diplomats from the early Cold War and still an active ambassador, captured an essential aspect of Kissinger’s approach when he wrote in his diary that Kissinger’s “physical and intellectual vigor amaze even those they discomfit … the spectacle of a 50-year old German-born Jew, exercising the authority he does in coping with with the end of an era complications of universal import elicits my sympathy, dazzles my imagination.” Kissinger devised a strategy, sensing how the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of world politics could be arranged to promote his vision of America’s national interest. He also recognized how his personal prestige could be harnessed to address these issues, and knew that success would further enhance his own personal power. Within days of the cease-fire, the TV networks were referring to Kissinger as the new “go-between” in dealing with Israel and the Arab world. Planning a trip to the Arab states in the region, Kissinger told Golda Meir, “One thing the Arabs have achieved in this war — regardless of what they lost — is that they’ve globalized the problem. They have created the conviction that something must be done, which we’ve arrested only by my prestige, by my trip, by maneuvers.”
Kissinger told the Chinese that the Russians had asked fro American intelligence on China, particularly satellite photographs, something that Kissinger interpreted as meaning “they want us to accept the desirability of destroying China’s nuclear capability or limiting it, rather than the information itself.”
Kissinger’s problem was how to get the Arab states to lift their embargo without seeming to succumb to the diplomatic blackmail. At times he postured in discussing the oil boycott with his staff, remarking, “I know what would have happened in the 19th century,” then describing how the US would have landed in the Arabian desert and divided up the oil fields. “But that obviously we cannot do,” he sadly concluded. At other times he vented his feelings more crudely: “It is ridiculous that the civilized world is held up by 8 million savages.”
In reality, Kissinger knew the only way out of the problem was getting peace negotiations in the Middle East started, which would help convince the Arab nations that the US genuinely sought a settlement. He told his staff, “We will have to pressure Israel, but if it looks like we do it under pressure, we won’t even get credit for it.”
That strategy, as Kissinger described it, was of being “the only participant who is in close touch with all the parties, the only power that can produce progress, and the only one that each is coming to in order to make that progress.”
The hope for peace lies on in Geneva, but wherever Henry Kissinger is.
Although he expressed understanding for Israeli concerns and recognized their vulnerability, he defended Sadat to the Israelis, pointing out that his “domestic situation” put limits on what he could concede. Ultimately Kissinger thought Sadat had “gone beyond the outer edge of what he feels is safe.” To finalize the agreement, Kissinger arranged for both Egypt and Israel to make their commitment to the US rather than to each other.
ABC News presented the agreement as a “personal triumph for Henry Kissinger,” describing him as a “conquering warrior back from the negotiating wars.” NBC’s David Brinkley called him a “public hero” and celebrated his successful diplomacy as proving that “a Kissinger might often be worth more than divisions, carriers or bombers and a great deal cheaper.”
The Frenchman was not far off in his assessment of Kissinger or his objectives. Kissinger himself would later admit, “Jobert was absolutely right when he said the energy conference was purely political. I don’t give a damn about energy. The issue is to break the other Europeans away from the French.” Kissinger told Nixon that unless the US took “tough action,” it would “lose the pro-American people in Europe because they can’t point out the bad consequences of anti-American actions.”
Kissinger was premature in thinking he had broken European resistance, and tensions grew worse over the next month. In early March the EEC’s rotating president, the German foreign minister Walter Scheel, told Kissinger that the EEC nations were going ahead with their dialogue with the Arab states, having reached the decision without consulting the Americans. Kissinger’s anger was barely concealed as he told Scheel, “I say in all seriousness that the US will not accept this procedure in the long run without it having a great effect on our relationship.” Kissinger accused the Europeans of undermining his diplomacy in the Middle East and ominously warned them, “Europe seems intent upon taking a path we will not accept. If Europe is determined to flat its foreign policy, then the US, too, will float its foreign policy. We will then have to see whose specific weight is the greatest.” His hostility was particularly centered on the French, whom he believed were “organically hostile to the US and now clearly constitute the greatest global opposition to US foreign policy.”
Kissinger’s skill as a negotiator rested on his intelligence, strategic vision, and pure physical stamina. He was, in the words of Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister, a “plenipotentiary” who would occasionally say he needed to discuss a matter with the president, but “clearly he was in charge.” He was also particularly adept at “explaining every situation in the manner most pleasing to the one who heard it.” This was only part of his talent. With the Israelis in particular, he was also able to paint realistic-sounding scenarios of what the consequences would be if his mission failed.
Assad was unmoved, but Kissinger’s efforts may have planted a seed that flourished later.
In the face of Meir’s intransigence, Kissinger told her, “Your choice is not between absolute security and no security. Your choice will be to weigh the alternatives of the various courses of action.”
American ambassador to Germany, Martin HIllenbrand, who was accompanying Kissinger, expected him to still be in a highly emotional and agitated state. Instead, Hillenbrand noted, Kissinger was “completely calm and looking forward to the meeting.” Hillenbrand wryly remarked, “I could only give him the highest marks for thespian ability.”
He really didn’t like the President. Nixon had made him the most admired man in the country, yet the Secretary couldn’t bring himself to feel affection for his patron.
There was no question in the new president’s mind that Kissinger needed to stay on. One of Ford’s assistants told a reporter, “Kissinger was America’s foreign policy.” The new president’s approach to foreign policy would be to “leave it to Henry.”
Under President Nixon every paper from a Cabinet officer went into him but through me, with a cover sheet,” adding that “at the end Nixon only red his memos.” Although Ford had been in Congress for 15 years and the House minority leader for almost a decade, his major focus had always been on domestic affairs, and his foreign policy views were an uncomplicated mix of Cold War shibboleths and traditional internationalism. He did not feel confident in foreign policy matters.
Years later Kissinger praised Ford as “an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation’s history.” After his first meeting with Ford, Kissinger left his office without feeling that there was any Nixon-like “hidden agenda,” and that with Ford, “what one saw was what one got.” The most succinct summation of the Ford-Kissinger relationship is that Gerald Ford thought that Henry Kissinger was brilliant and that Henry Kissinger agreed. Ford later wrote, “It would be hard for me to overstate the admiration and affection I had for Henry.”
Ford also identifies Kissinger as providing him with the counsel to back away from his earlier pledge not to seek the Republican nomination in 1976. Kissinger told him such a move would be “disastrous” and emphasized that foreign governments would view him as “a lame duck” and that it would have terrible consequences for dealing with Congress.
Robert Hartmann, one of Ford’s closest aides, regarded Kissinger as not just “the ablest diplomat” he had ever seen but also “as good a politician — internecine or international — as all but a formidable few,” including on his list Winston Churchill, FDR, Nixon and Golda Meir.
As brilliant, ambitious, and arrogant as Kissinger, Schlesinger would find his fatal flaw in his inability to avoid condescending to Ford, whom he did not fully respect.
Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was, as Kissinger described, the most “formidable new arrival” and “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly.”
Polls showed that Kissinger was America’s most admired man for the second year in a row, and judged by 85% of Americans as doing a “splendid job.”
He never wavered in his conviction that “quiet diplomacy” was more effective than public demands.
Kissinger described the negotiations as something akin to a “Kabuki play — extremely stylized with a near-traditional script and foreordained outcome.”
The bitter tase of failure: the Sinai negotiations and the fall of Saigon.
Kissinger recognized that he was trying to get the Israelis to make “a generous counterproposal which could convince Sadat of their seriousness,” rather than a “rigid” point-by-point interrogation of each issue in any agreement. It was an approach that also called for a great deal of trust in their mediator, and Kissinger personalized the negotiations in striking ways. “The impact on our international situation could not be more serious,” Kissinger tole the Israeli leaders. “From the Shah to Western Europe, from the Soviet Union to Japan it will be hard to explain why the US failed to move a country of less than 3 million totally dependent on it in the face of Egyptian proposals which seem extremely generous to them.” To Kissinger, whose belief in the interconnectedness of world events was always central to his thinking, his conviction that America was being challenged around the world made him ever more desperate for a success.
Kissinger painted an exceptionally gloomy picture for the Israelis, telling them that this was “another lost opportunity,” and that there was “a good possibility there will be another war in the next year.” When Foreign Minister Yigal Allon challenged him to resume diplomacy in a few weeks, Kissinger once again personalized the issue, telling Allon that he could not, “Because I am no longer the figure who mesmerizes them in the Arab world, because in every area the US is no longer a country that one has to take seriously.” As the meeting ended, he grew philosophical, agreeing with Rabin that this was like a Greek tragedy: “Each side, following the laws of its own nature, reaches an outcome that was perfectly foreseeable.”
As he had done with Nixon, Kissinger taunted Ford when he told him, “Israel doesn’t think they have to be afraid of you.” Ford’s stern reply, “They will find out,” marked the beginning of the “reassessment” that Ford had threatened, and Kissinger made sure to leak the message to the media that “if I were an Israeli, I’d be nervous.”
Kissinger wanted a tough policy, “a cooling of relations with Israel — which should be friendly but correct,” to restore a sense of American leadership in the region, despite his thinking that “step-by-step is dead” and that the US had “to consider whether we and the Soviet Union shouldn’t make a global approach.”
He had paid little attention to the area once the Middle East became the focus of his diplomacy in October 1973. His instinctive reaction was to see Vietnam in light of his current difficulties: “No one thought the North Vietnamese would attack this year. They did it based on their assessment of American weakness.”
On March 26, 1975, he held a news conference and made an impassioned plea for assistance to South Vietnam, framing it as a “moral commitment” that would determine “what kind of people we are.”
Such criticism from his friends in the media was not what Kissinger expected, and in the past it might have chastened him and sent him into overdrive trying to explain himself. This time it brought out a more aggressive and angry side of his personality, as well as his deep pessimism about the current state of the world. Along with frequent bitter comments like “To have the US as an ally is really a joy these days,” and “We are a disgrace to be an ally,” Kissinger tried to defend his past role in the Vietnam negotiations. “You tell me, would any treaties have been maintained when no party was willing to enforce it?”
Kissinger told a meeting of the “Wise Men” group of the American foreign policy establishment that while most foreign policy setbacks are inflicted by foreigners, “ours instead are being inflicted by ourselves.” American authority had preserved the peace of the world for 30 years, but now it was acting like the unstable and ineffectual “French governments of the Third and Fourth Republics,” and “inviting some misbehavior from the Soviets.”
Ford gave a strong speech to Congress on April 10, 1975, pleading for $722M in military and humanitarian assistance for South Vietnam. There was not one clap of applause in Congress for the speech, with two members even walking out in protest.
You know what agony we were going through to get out of that war. Everyone wanted us to get out; public opinion was to get the hell out of there. People think we had the opportunity to get the perfect agreement.
Kissinger told sympathetic journalists that although he knew there were people around Ford who wanted to see Kissinger’s influence “diminished,” he was staying on with the administration “for two reasons — it is not fair to pass along the problems I now have and, second, I am trying to rally what can be rallied.”
Kissinger strongly defended detente based on the idea that “we have certain interests in common, such as the prevention of general nuclear war, such as limiting conflict in areas where both of us could get directly involved.” He stressed, “Detente has never meant the absence of competition,” a comment that hardly accorded with the way he once described it during the heady days of the first Nixon-Brezhnev summits.
When Ford mentioned his potential rival within the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, Kissinger immediately dismissed him as “incompetent,” and agreed with Ford that any Democrat would be a “disaster.”
Privately, with President Ford and his deputy Scowcroft, Kissinger expressed his anger toward the Israelis, telling Ford that their behavior was an “outrage” and “an indignity to the US.” He wanted “psychological warfare against Israel,” believing that they “blew up 18 months of US diplomacy.” In a revealing comment, he complained bitterly that it was “damn humiliating” that the Israelis seemed to think “that I needed and the President needed this agreement ourselves. And the US desperately needed a success.”
Kissinger knew that Rabin’s weak domestic position was at the heart of his obstinacy, and that the American pressure might help him overcome opposition within his cabinet to the interim agreement.
Kissinger posed questions he often asked in private meetings of critics: “What is the alternative they propose? What precise policies do they want us to change? Are they prepared for a prolonged situation of dramatically increased international danger?” Kissinger ended with one question that he often posed to his more conservative critics: “Can we ask our people to support confrontation unless they know that every reasonable alternative has been explored?”
He claimed that the US does not “and will not condone repressive practices” and “will use our influence against repressive practices. Our traditions and our interests demand it.” Kissinger, however, also tried to caution his liberal critics. “Truth compels also a recognition of our limits,” he intoned, making it clear that he did not believe his listeners understood those limits. In part, Kissinger saw it as a question of methods: “The question is whether we promote human rights more effectively by counsel and friendly relations, where this serves our interest, or by confrontational propaganda and discriminatory legislation.”
“Our alliances and political relationships are not favors to other governments, but reflect a recognition of mutual interests. They should be withdrawn only when our interests change and not as punishment for some act with which we do not agree.” He also took aim at liberals who pushed for withdrawal from Vietnam but wanted the US to push harder on human rights in South Korea and Indonesia.
“Painful experience should have taught us that we ought not exaggerate our capacity to foresee, let alone to shape, social and political change in other societies.” He concluded by restating the way he thought America should approach foreign policy: “The question is not whether our values should affect our foreign policy but how. The issue is whether we have the courage to face complexity and the inner conviction to deal with ambiguity; whether we will look behind easy slogans and recognize that our great goals can only be reached by patience, and in imperfect stages.”
Kissinger’s personalization of “his” foreign policy, and his insistence on maintaining his tight control over it, proved counterproductive. Hew saw congressional criticism not as a rejection of the policy but as an attack on him personally. Although there was intellectual merit in his view of how best to advance American values and human rights, Kissinger’s behavior toward his congressional opponents ultimately backfired.
He told Ford that his talks with the Israelis had “taken on more the character of exchanges between adversaries than between friends,” and described the Israelis as “treacherous, petty, and deceitful.”
Kissinger’s outburst misses the degree to which his policies had served to energize critics on both the right and left of the political spectrum. Overselling detente helped the right to portray the continuing competition with the Soviets as a one-way street. Competing with the Soviet Union in a Third World country of no great strategic significance motivated the left. The road Kissinger walked between these two schools of criticism was made more difficult through his own personalization of all foreign policy questions as well as his penchant for secrecy and duplicity. Yet Kissinger’s personal failings aside, he was not wrong about the problem facing American foreign policy. Kissinger told Ford that the task America faced was to “manage the emergence of the Soviets to a superpower status without a war.” He feared that Congress was depriving the executive of “both carrot and stick,” and in an echo of his own criticism of “massive retaliation” two decades earlier, he told Ford, “We will soon be in the position of nuclear war or nothing.”
Ramsbotham’s insight captured the fundamental tension between the intellectual Kissinger and the political Kissinger. Kissinger spoke pessimistically in private, gloomy about America’s political climate as well as his own personal situation. Kissinger’s pessimism, especially his musings about America’s decline, become “the only red-hot issue” in the race for the Republican nomination. Yet if Kissinger worried about his job security and his legacy, it did not lead him to inactivity. As Ramsbotham noted, he actively searched for new places to apply the Kissinger magic, both to assert American power and, in a lesson he had learned from Nixon in 1972, to help Ford stay president.
When Kissinger responded, “If Reagan keeps going after me I will have to get after him,” Nixon counseled him, “Don’t do anything by name,” and “Stay above the battle.”
He then dropped a bombshell by saying he was removing the word “detente” from his vocabulary and from now on would talk about “peace through strength.”
Kissinger went on to say that there was no consistent standard for criticizing detente. On the one hand, some criticized the Ford administration for being too soft on the Soviet Union, while on the other hand, some complained that the US did not work effectively with the Soviet Union against its traditional allies. Kissinger’s juxtaposition of these attacks on detente was designed to highlight the middle ground the administration occupied and, by implication, the soundness of the policy.
While not uttering his name, Kissinger criticized Reagan for avoiding the complex issues of foreign policy through “nostalgic simplicities.” “What do those who speak go glibly about one-way streets or preemptive concessions propose concretely that this country do? What precisely has been given up? What level of confrontation do they seek? What threats would they make? What risks would they run?”
Kissinger now believed that the US was “the only power capable of affecting the calculations of the parties.”
We wanted you to succeed. We do not want to harass you. I will do what I can. Of course, you understand, that means I will be harassed. But I have discovered that after the personal abuse reaches a certain level you become invulnerable.
Kissinger also made it clear that the US could do little to help Smith’s Rhodesia, referencing America’s own racial politics. “With 50% of our combat troops being black because of our all-volunteer Army,” there was really no “domestic situation in which we could support Smith.”
Kissinger was talking about step-by-step diplomacy, usually by creating a certain degree of “creative ambiguity” in the terms of the agreements he discussed, but pushing the process forward. Unfortunately, Kissinger’s methods, and any gradual approaches to a moral issue, are always open to condemnation by those who want more immediate and sweeping action but who may underestimate the obstacles and the human costs that action might entail.
This is Africa, and one can never count on anything until it is completed.
It would take more than three years and almost a completely different cast of characters before the newly named Zimbabwe would come into existence.
Time magazine did call the agreement “the spectacular climax of a carefully and astutely planned push for peace.” NBC News described it as a “triumph for Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy.” On CBS, Eric Sevareid credited Kissinger with getting “the train on the track.”
In his first major foreign policy address, Carter had emphasized, “I believe that the foreign policy spokesman of our country should be the President, and not the Secretary of State.” In what was a clear attack on the Kissinger style, Carter argued, “The conduct of foreign policy should be a sustained process of decision and action, and not a series of TV spectaculars.”
Ford emphasized how he would stress, “What is more moral than peace? What is more moral than bringing peace in the Middle East? What is more moral than what we’re doing in Southern Africa?”
The White House puts out that … you overrule me frequently. That makes you look weak, as if we compete.
At this point Kissinger confessed to Ford, “I am getting worked up. But this guy really burns me. He is super liberal and now he is turning tough.”
Kissinger regretted only that Ford did not “get the chance to conceptualize.” What Kissinger politely ignored was that Ford had taken various parts of Kissinger’s advice for answering the Sonnenfeldt Doctrine question but assembled them in the wrong way and with the wrong emphasis. Ford had faith in Kissinger and in Kissinger’s concept of foreign policy, but he was not equipped to explain it.
The summer of 1983 was a low point for President Reagan. Although the economy was recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s, and his approval rating had inched up from its dismal 35% in January, Reagan’s Central American policy was deeply unpopular.
When he asked one of Reagan’s aides if there were a position for Kissinger in the new administration, the aide answered, “We want Ronald Reagan on the cover of Time magazine. We do not want Henry Kissinger on the cover of Time magazine.”
This “retirement” from public office was more akin to that of an ex-president than an ordinary cabinet officer, as Kissinger remained a celebrity figure of enormous influence and continuing media interest, commenting on foreign policies of his successors and opining on America’s engagement in world politics.
Parliamentary systems have a group of opposition party members who server as the “shadow cabinet” to the government, providing an alternative perspective on policies and ready to assume power in the wake of an election.
The expectation that he would be back in a position of power soon was widely shared, and Kissinger cultivated it as well. In an interview on his last day in office, he told The New York Times that he was passing on to his successor “a world that is at peace, more at peace than in any previous transition, in which, in addition, in every problem area solutions can be foreseen even if they have not been fully achieved and the framework for solution exist, in which the agenda of most international negotiations was put forward by the US.” He summarized this wordy description of his achievements by adding, “It cannot be entirely an accident, and it cannot be a series of tactical improvisations.”
Carter, who made it a point to be seen carrying his own luggage, told his cabinet that his administration would economize, avoiding the “ostentatiousness” of Kissinger’s foreign travels. Carter allowed the State Department to pay for the $10,500 for Kissinger’s official portrait to be painted, even though he decreed that in the future color photographs would be used.
The Carter administration valued Kissinger’s support, especially on the Panama issue, but many within the White House resented the “negative power” he enjoyed over the administration’s foreign policy. They also resented his skill with the media.
He fed the press like they were a flock of birds. They ate well and they ate regularly, and they sang and sang Henry’s song.
Kissinger, who was jolted by the death of the man who was “like a father to me,” eulogized Rockefeller in powerful words: “What a great President he would have been! How he would have ennobled us! What an extraordinary combination of strength and humanity, decisiveness and vision!”
A major novelist has taken on our greatest celebrity with all the power and wit and language at his command. Perhaps not since Tolstoy eviscerated Napoleon has a central historical figure been so intimately castigated by the Word.
Kissinger’s angry reactions revealed the degree to which he had become accustomed to “gentle handling by the media.”
If you have Kissinger in that job, you wind up by competing with your own Secretary of State and he takes over the world.
Kissinger regarded Reagan as “a nice man, a decent man. He listens, and tries to understand, in so far as he is capable of understanding foreign policy. But I don’t have the impression that he ever ingests anything you tell him.”
To these privileged and powerful companies, Kissinger dispensed his foreign policy wisdom, undertook diplomatic assignments, and was a “personal NSA to their chairmen.”
It is we who must lead in this alliance.
Kissinger attacked those “who luxuriate in the myth of diabolic Soviet planners implementing a detailed master plan for world revolution.” Invoking his own experience, he remarked, “No one who has actually dealt with the Soviet leadership has encountered such types.”
The instinct for self-preservation on Soviet leaders should lead at least some of them to the conclusion that the country is overextended and must somewhere retrench. This is not psychology; it is reality.
He criticized Vice President Bush as “a very weak man,” and thought George Shultz had “no knowledge of foreign policy” and would be “at the mercy of the State Department bureaucracy.”
His media profile remained high. A survey from 1975 to 1987 showed 10,187 mentions of Kissinger in the press, behind only President Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor.
Kissinger advocated a rigid policy of no concessions to terrorists, fully understanding that “innocent lives must and will be sacrificed in pursuit of this higher purpose.”
More important, Kissinger saw the Reykjavik summit as an example of the amateurishness of the Reagan foreign policy team, with the president poorly prepared and the Soviet leader able to dictate the proceedings.
In Kissinger’s words, on both the Reykjavik and Iran issues, Reagan “lacked a reasoned statement of options and consequences,” which in Kissinger’s language meant that the administration had no idea what it was doing.
“As soon as we got on the plane, Nixon was his old self again, trying to manipulate everybody and everything, dropping poisonous remarks, doing his best to set people against each other.” He added that when he was in the car with Gerald Ford alone, Ford said to him, “Sometimes I wish I had never pardoned that son of a bitch.”
He remained convinced that the removal of theater nuclear forces in Europe would favor the Soviets, in large part because the Western democracies were lulled into complacency by arms control and would not make the fiscal sacrifices necessary to build up their conventional forces.
Kissinger told Schlesinger that he found Quayle to be “well-informed and intelligent,” which Schlesinger took to mean, “That Quayle listens reverently to Henry and that Henry thinks Quayle may be President someday.”
We should not be trying to reform you and you should agree to live in conditions of relative and not absolute security. I do not believe that you have any plans for world revolution, and the Soviet Union does not have capabilities for that either.
In late 1989, Kissinger advised President Bush that a “two-Germanys policy” would be “disastrous,” warning that “if the Germans see us as obstructing their aspirations, we’ll pay a price later on.”
One former staff member remarked that the book was just “a long overdue correction to his Superman image,” but to Kissinger, for whom his Superman image was central to his self-promotion as well as his power and influence, it was an unwelcome affront.
“I’ve never know a man so admired and distrusted at the same time.” Gelb accused Kissinger of telling foreign representatives that Clinton was “dangerously inexperienced in world politics,” surrounded by naive former Carter officials and, with only 43% of the vote, lacking a mandate for change.
Some of Kissinger’s passages about Roosevelt are essentially identical to the way he would describe his own foreign policy: “Roosevelt was impatient with the pieties which dominated American thinking on foreign policy.” “Nothing annoyed Roosevelt as much as high sounding principles backed by neither power nor the will to implement them.” “To Roosevelt, peace was inherently fragile and could be preserved only by eternal vigilance, by the arms of the strong, and by alliances among the like-minded.”
Ernest May, a former colleague of Kissinger’s, praised the book for its “marriage of vision and shrewdness” in treating the subject of diplomacy, but also noted that the book is “a book of maxims disguised as a history of statecraft. The maxims are often splendid. The history is not.”
In Kissinger’ view, the Ford presidency was more successful and more accomplished than previously believed, and Reagan’s policy was, “in fact, a canny elaboration of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations combined with the rhetoric of Wilsonianism — a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism.”
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
32 years after he had left his last public office, two US presidential candidates were still invoking Kissinger’s name and claiming his approval for the diplomatic strategies they would use with America’s adversaries. It was a remarkable testament to the degree to which Kissinger had become identified in history and legend as a symbol of American foreign policy — a hotly contested one, but a symbol nevertheless.
Although Kissinger would object to the word “derange,” he might be pleased that Rosenberg considered him such a world-changing historical figure. Determined not to “fade away” from public life Douglas MacArthur-style, Kissinger waged an extraordinarily successful campaign to remain politically relevant.
In his condolence call, Kissinger told Marton that Obama reminded him of Richard Nixon because both Nixon and Obama were loners, resistant to friendships with Washington politicians and officials. He added, “The key difference is that Nixon liked to have big personalities around him, Obama does not.”
For his part Kissinger published two extended articles in The Atlantic on the challenge that artificial intelligence posed to human society. From nuclear weapons to artificial intelligence, the 96-year-old Henry Kissinger remained a voice in American public life.
Tocqueville believed that democracies, unlike aristocracies, lacked the capacity to act with the necessary resolve, secrecy, and speed. These qualities, which were inherent to aristocracies, are essential to success in foreign policy. He further questioned whether a democratic nation could ever possess the long-term perspective required to undertake complicated international initiatives whose results would not be known for decades.
Some writers have even traced Kissinger’s distrust of mass democracy and its “self-destructive elements” to his family’s experiences with the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. At least as far as the conduct of American foreign policy went, Kissinger, as the dutiful agent of Richard Nixon, was nevertheless quite successful in overcoming the procedural weaknesses and dilemmas that American democracy created for the conduct of foreign policy.
With his skill in communicating with both print and television journalists, along with an intellectual firepower that impressed and intimidated politicians, Kissinger played a crucial role in selling this foreign policy, giving the impression of an unusual intelligence and design behind American actions in the world. This perception, that Americans had a strategy, that they knew what they were doing as they recalibrated and retrenched from the expansive foreign policy, was crucial to the appeal of Kissingerian foreign policy. This gave foreign policy during the Kissinger years a perception of both reliability and creativity that Americans and foreign leaders could all appreciate, even when they disagreed with various measures and actions.
Although never one to acknowledge any weakness, Kissinger recognized some of the limitations in his diplomacy. He told a group of Foreign Service officers in 1977, “When you are in these positions you can’t really reflect about their meaning because as you rise through the policy process your actions become really more and more like those of an athlete … You have to react almost instinctively and you have to worry later about the significance of what you have done.”
The appearance of intelligence, control, and competence was as important, if not more important, to Kissinger than the reality of that control; or as one historian put it, Kissinger’s “greatest exertions were directed toward the tactical manipulation of perceptions.” Kissinger’s great fear, which he candidly expressed to the Israeli ambassador during the Yom Kippur War, was to be exposed as being incompetent, to having “screwed up” a crisis. When things started to go wrong for Kissinger, with the Jackson-Vanik Admendment, the fall of Saigon, and the fiasco in Angola, it was important for him to be able to blame Congress, to deflect responsibility away from the misjudgments and miscalculations he had made.
The Frenchman did not anticipate how, as it became the world’s first superpower and stood at the center of international order, America’s foreign policy would remain interwoven with domestic politics and the struggle for political ascendancy at home.
Although “Kissinger’s realism, competence, and success always played better with the general public than with the ideological activists in either party, and the secretary of state remained a respected asset to Ford going into the fall election,” the electorate was far more concerned with economic issues.
In what was a careful criticism of American exceptionalism, Kissinger insisted, “Today we find that — like most other nations in history — we can neither escape from the world nor dominate it. Today we must conduct diplomacy with subtlety, flexibility, maneuver, and imagination in the pursuit of our interests. We must be thoughtful in defining our interests. We must prepare against the worst contingency and not only plan for the best. We must pursue limited objectives and many objectives simultaneously.”
Kissinger’s personalization of power was further encouraged and augmented through his successful exploitation of both the print and electronic media. Kissinger cultivated, nourished, and charmed journalists, reporters, and media executives with extraordinary energy, and was willing to spend hours explaining his policies, answering their questions, and calming their worries. Journalists reciprocated, treating him far more favorably than other administration figures, especially Nixon, whose own attitude toward the media was one of general contempt and loathing. Kissinger even recognized that within the relatively colorless Nixon administration, his image as a “playboy” or “swinger” increased the media attention devoted to him. He had a personal interest in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and his newfound prominence led Hollywood to reciprocate the interest. Kissinger did not carefully plot his ascent as a pop icon and celebrity, but he took steps during his time in office that made this development more likely. Achieving that stature and worldwide celebrity contributed to the power and influence he exercised as an American representative, especially in the Middle East, where he seemed the “indispensable” man to the peace negotiations. Even if he could never become what one letter writer to Time magazine proposed, “president of the planet earth,” Kissinger understood how his celebrity status brought with it a form of political power. Kissinger himself was on of the most successful self-promoters in late 20th-century American public life.
The Nixon Doctrine, however, fundamentally rested on the principle that the US would no longer, as Nixon put it, “conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”
Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major West European powers? The maker of grand strategy in the Cold War had to consider all cases simultaneously in the context of a prolonged struggle against a hostile and heavily armed rival.
Unlike Robert McNamara, whose apology for his role in the Vietnam War stirred a national debate in the 1990s, Henry Kissinger remained unapologetic about his decision-making role in foreign policy, even expressing disdain for McNamara’s public regrets.
Henry Kissinger was and is a complicated man — brilliant, devious, suspicious, arrogant, insecure, obsequious, paranoid, thoughtful, tenacious, domineering, vulnerable, direct, deceptive, insensitive, eloquent, petty, turgid, witty, thin-skinned — in short, the polytropos that Hans Morgenthau recognized when Kissinger was at the height of his world fame. Kissinger is also a truly significant historical figure and symbol of America’s international power, a man who played a critical role in American foreign policy and whose long life after his government service has allowed him to try to shape both the understanding of that era and America’s subsequent history. Henry Kissinger both exercised and symbolized 20th-century American power, leaving a legacy that 21st-century Americans are still seeking to understand.