He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people. I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.
After being accused of “genocide and collective massacre”, Kissinger began to talk about his childhood. The room hushed.
More than a dozen of his relatives had been killed in the holocaust, he said, so he knew something of the nature of genocide. It was easy for human rights crusaders and peace activists to insist on perfection in this world. But the policymaker who has to deal with reality learns to seek the best that can be achieved rather than the best that can be imagined. It would be wonderful to banish the role of military power from world affairs, but the world is not perfect, as he had learned as a child. Those with true responsibility for peace, unlike those on the sidelines, cannot afford pure idealism. They must have the courage to deal with ambiguities and accommodations, to realize that great goals can be achieved only in imperfect steps. No side has a monopoly on morality.
Kissinger’s charm usually succeeded, for he was an engaging and intelligent and witty man. But it had a dark side: by trying to seduce a broad spectrum of people, he inevitably developed a reputation for duplicity. “Henry enjoys the complexity of deviousness. Other people when they lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style, as if it were an arabesque.”
He had been identified, he said, as someone who cared more about stabilizing the balance of power than about moral issues. “I would rather like to think,” he added, “that when the record is written, one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease. But I leave that to history.”
The shrouds would be removed, Brezhnev said, just before Nixon’s arrival, so the urns would be spotless. Kissinger later said that it was a sign of the deep insecurity that gnawed at the Russian soul. “But never forget,” he added, “that feelings of insecurity can lead to bluster and arrogance.”
There was, as Kissinger would admit, an insecurity that gnawed at his own soul, and also a well-known streak of arrogance - the legacy, perhaps, of a childhood spent feeling both smarter and beleaguered than those around him. Intellectually, he was self-assured: he enjoyed debating ideas and having his theories honestly challenged. But on a personal level, he brooded about adversaries real and imagined. His sensitivity to slights verged on a paranoia, and his dealings with colleagues tended to be conspiratorial, attitudes reinforced by his odd alliance with Richard Nixon.
Kissinger’s tendency to be secretive, even deceitful, was partly a reflection of this insecurity and nervousness. But it was also linked to the policies he pursued. Diplomacy based on moral idealism or international law is easy to wage openly; but a realist approach involving ambiguous compromises and power ploys lends itself to covert acts and deception, since it is likely to arouse popular disapproval if publicly articulated. Because Kissinger harbored the dark suspicion that many of his cold calculations of national security interests would not command popular or congressional support, he engaged in a foreign policy based on stealth and surprise. “If he were ten percent less brilliant and ten percent more honest, he would be a great man,” Nahum Goldmann, an American Jewish leader and longtime friend of the Kissinger family, once said.
Kissinger’s most salient trait, the one that underlay both his personality and his policies, was an intellectual brilliance that even his most ardent critics concede. In casual conversations or at formal meetings, he was able to weave together nuances and insights in a manner that brought discussions to a higher plane. As Zhou Enlai had said after exploring the world balance with him during their first meeting in 1971, “You are a very brilliant man, Dr. Kissinger.”
At the core of his brilliance was an ability to see the relationships between different events and to conceptualize patterns. Like a spider in its web, he sensed, sometimes too acutely, how an action in one corner of the world would reverberate in another, how the application of power in one place would ripple elsewhere.
In probing ideas, he was intellectually honest, surprising so to those who considered him otherwise deceitful. He surrounds himself with bright people of different philosophic hues, challenged them relentlessly, and was in turn willing to be challenged by them.
Kissinger was both a strategist and a tactician. One of the strengths of his mind was its ability to engage on disparate levels, from the grand to the petty. In his writings, he mixed broad-brush maxims with detailed drypoints of small incidents. In his daily work, he would worry about sweeping historic forces at the same time as he fretted about the most trivial of bureaucratic slights. And he could envision overarching geostrategic frameworks - for the Middle East, for detente, for the Soviet-Chinese-American triangular relationship - while also tending to the countless tiny tactical bargaining levers he hoped to employ.
He grew up in an environment where trust was not readily instilled and where virtue was not its own reward, so he came naturally to the pessimistic view of human nature that underlies realpolitik. He had “the brooding melancholy of a man who has experienced tragedy as a child,” said his old Harvard colleague Stanley Hoffmann. The ghost of Spengler walked at his side.
“In times of adversity,” he said, “you were the one who held us together through your courage and spirit and devotion. Everything I have achieved, that our family has achieved, is due to you.”
Paula Kissinger paused for a moment and took in the scene. Then she said, in her better-than-perfect English, “It was worth to have lived a life for.”
Kissinger was part of and old if not particularly venerable breed in Washington: top officials who leave government and then find themselves paid handsomely by clients who value not just their minds and talent, but also their connections, clout, and Rolodexes. Some make it seem more respectable by doing it under the thin guise of being lawyers. Others come right out and call themselves lobbyists and consultants. There is no clear line between what is acceptable and what is not. Rather, it is a matter of degree, discretion, and style.
In the end, unless the nation chooses to limit participation on boards and commissions to people who are uninvolved with the subject at stake, it must rely on the honesty of those who serve. “If you show me a situation with no conflicts,” said American Express Chairman Robinson, “I’ll show you a level of mediocrity and incompetence that means nothing will ever happen.”
Kissinger traveled to Tokyo that March and met with his friend the Japanese finance minister. That was enough to settle the government’s qualms, and the deal ended up going through. “He is able to handle shuttle diplomacy,” Robinson said, “because both sides trust him.”
When Gerald Ford was retiring from the board of American Express in 1984, he recommended Kissinger as his replacement. “A lot of you fellows may not like Henry, and he may be controversial in this country, but he is not controversial abroad. He knows people and can get doors open and can get things done.”
“Henry has an incredible capacity to stay current,” said Robinson. Before leaving on any major trip, Kissinger would usually call Robinson to see if there were any issues to be explored in the countries he planned to visit. Sometimes Robinson would cite a specific problem or two. For example, American Express was seeking a license for its banking subsidiary to do business in Hungary. When Kissinger traveled there, he raised the issue with the new government and stressed that the American Express bank should get priority because it would also serve to build the country’s tourism industry.
Kissinger and Robinson traveled together frequently, especially to Japan. “He has introduced me to several high-level Japanese government officials,” Robinson said. “I may have met them otherwise, but when you do it under Henry’s auspices, it can be a more personal involvement.” When Kissinger makes the introduction, it is as if he is saying, “I can vouch for these guys.”
Wherever Henry goes, everyone wants to meet with him. This guy is larger than life. It’s like traveling with someone who is still a secretary of state. And there’s a reason: he works at it.
Henry hasn’t lost the spellbinding mystique he had when he was secretary of state. He gets immediate respect wherever he goes.
One of Kissinger’s first assignments for AIG was to help it get a license to sell life insurance in South Korea, which it had been seeking unsuccessfully for fifteen years. Kissinger went to Seoul and spoke to members of the government, who blamed the problem on the lower levels of the bureaucracy. Greenberg was amazed at how thoroughly Kissinger mastered the substance of the licensing process; he did not simply raise the issue with the Koreans and let someone else deal with the details. “The fact that he took the time to understand the process so well,” Greenberg said, “meant that he was able to clear away the bureaucratic underbrush that should not have been there in the first place.” By 1989, AIG had opened a life insurance office in Korea.
“I think he made up his mind that he had been involved with too much intellectual stuff,” said Jan Cushing Amory, who had once been a girlfriend. “He wanted a group that would put him on a pedestal.”
He ended up hiring the head of his Secret Service team to lead a group of five private bodyguards to provide the same around-the-clock protection at a cost to Kissinger of just over $150K a year.
The private planes and bodyguards were trappings of a style that helped to guarantee that Kissinger would not recede into obscurity. Secretaries such as Dean Rusk and even Dean Acheson had been able to slip back into private life with the pretense of enjoying the unassuming style that is the luxury of people who have already achieved great stature. Not Kissinger. In one of the most amazing gravity-defying feats in the American media age, he was able to maintain his heightened aura long after even his successors could reenter restaurants unnoticed.
Kissinger’s continued celebrity came partly from the force of his personality and mind. Even out of power, he could be dazzling in public and charming in private life: he dispensed weighty insights on television, shared confidences at dinner parties, and regaled lecture audiences with a brilliant mixture of maxims and anecdotes.
In addition, he cultivated the high-wattage aura of a person who - both by the natural force of his presence and by careful work - knows how to be the center of attention in any room he enters. Never reticent about projecting his personality, Kissinger realized that his image was his most marketable asset. If people were to pay $30K to have him speak or $250K to act as a consultant, it would not simply be for the substance of his thoughts. Part of his appeal would be the power of his mystique, which made it all the more worth tending.
NATO Secretary-General Joseph Luns gave what sounded like a eulogy. “You will stand in history as one of the most effective foreign ministers of our century. May I summarize our common feeling by quoting Shakespeare: ‘He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.’”
“Can you tell me,” asked one reporter at a press conference in Brussels, “what you consider to be your greatest success and your greatest failure?” Kissinger replied, “I don’t quite understand your second point.” When the briefing ended, the foreign journalists gave him a standing ovation.
When I came here in 1938, I was asked to write an essay at George Washington High School about what it meant to be an American. I wrote that, of course, it was hard being separated from the people with whom I had grown up and from the places that were familiar to me. But I thought that this was a country where one could walk across the street with one’s head erect, and therefore it was all worthwhile. What America means to the rest of the world is the hope for people everywhere that they shall be able to walk with their heads erect. And our responsibility as Americans is always to make sure that our purposes transcend our differences.
This pessimism was reflected in his thesis on “The Meaning of History,” written in 1950 as an undergraduate at Harvard: “Life is suffering. Birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence. No civilization has yet been permanent … The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.” In the end Kissinger rejected the full implications of Spengler’s pessimism and adopted a quirky interpretation of Kant to conclude that “the experience of freedom enables us to rise beyond the suffering of the past and the frustrations of history.” In other words, people - and especially great statesmen - have some freedom to shape events and avoid tragedy.
Almost 25 years later, the same ideas emerged in a reflective interview that Kissinger gave to James Reston. “As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected.” Kissinger did go on to say that the job of a statesman was to prevent such declines from occurring. But he retained his claim to pessimism by adding: “I think of myself as a historian more than a statesman.”
Immanuel Kant, in his essay “Perpetual Peace,” which Kissinger dissected as a Harvard undergraduate, wrote that to achieve perpetual peace requires perpetual work, for peace involves a constantly shifting construct, not a final product. To Kissinger, the critics of detente misunderstood what that policy was. “It is a continuing process, not a final condition.” The idea was not to give up the rivalry with the Soviet Union; instead, it was to create a web of ties that would moderate the conflict that comes with such a rivalry. “By acquiring a stake in this network of relationship with the West, the Soviet Union may become more conscious of what it would lose by a return to confrontation.”
Kissinger’s structure of peace thus relied on linkages: Soviet behavior in one field might be rewarded by agreements in another. But in the world according to Kissinger and Nixon, linkage should not extend to internal matters such as domestic human rights policies. “What is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy,” Nixon told Mao at the first meeting in 1972. “What is important is its policy toward the rest of the world and toward us.”
In a world shadowed by the danger of nuclear holocaust, there is no rational alternative to the pursuit of a relaxation of tensions.
The great difficulty with detente was trying to sell it politically. “The trouble - no, the tragedy - is that the dual concept of containment and coexistence,” Kissinger wrote, “has no automatic consensus behind it.” Americans had traditionally viewed the world in a Manichaean way: nations are at peace or at war, they are either good or evil, friend or foe. This led to a historic oscillation between isolationism and overcommitment. That was the nature of the challenge that Kissinger found himself facing as the domestic support for detente deteriorated.
Nixon had only one piece of personnel advice when he called Ford to the White House to say that he was resigning: keep Kissinger. But Nixon added a caveat. “Henry is a genius, but you don’t have to accept everything he recommends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.” Nixon put it more bluntly when speaking to one of his staffers. “Ford has just got to realize there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts,” he said. “Because sometimes Henry starts to think he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”
For much of the conversation, Nixon was able to stay composed. But when he raised the prospect of facing a criminal trial after his resignation, he became overwrought. A trial would kill him, he said. That was what his enemies wanted. “If they harass you,” Kissinger pledged, “I am going to resign.” He would quit and tell the world why. As Nixon recalled the scene, Kissinger’s voice broke as he made the promise, and he began to cry.
That, Nixon later recalled, caused him to cry as well. “Henry, you’re not going to resign,” the president said. “Don’t ever talk that way,” The country would need him, there was no one who could shine his shoes, much less fill them.
Schooled in the graces of society, though averse to publicity in the manner of most women of his breeding, Nancy was commanding in social situations. She was the type who could impress a Rockefeller or Alsop with her style, and who could never seem an embarrassment to an immigrant professor trying to make it in a more rarefied crowd. “For a Jewish kid from Germany wanting acceptance, the Maginnes type would be his dream,” said one woman on Rockefeller’s staff. “The right schools, the right clubs, the right kind of people.”
Once he had scaled the bastions of America’s power elite, Kissinger seemed fascinated by gaining entree into its social elite. In this pursuit he was not particularly discriminating: he was drawn both to the cafe-society crowd of international jet-setters whose pictures frequented the pages of Women’s Wear Daily and also to the more subdued social world inhabited by old-line New York Social Register families. Nancy’s position at the intersection of these two worlds was one of the things that attracted Kissinger to her. He would astonish friends by remarking: “Can you believe that she’s a member of the Colony Club and wants to marry me?”
Kissinger’s primary tactic with journalists, as with most everyone else he wished to befriend, was flattery. “I am calling you because I know you are the only one covering me who will understand this,” he would purr. Like a sorcerer’s incantation, the flattery worked. “You know you are being played like a violin,” says Christopher Ogden, who covered Kissinger for Time, “but it’s extremely seductive. He tells you what he thinks you want to hear, then asks what you think. It’s very flattering.”
Another tactic was intimacy. With an air of slight indiscretion and personal trust, neither totally feigned, Kissinger would share confidences and inside information. “You always have the feeling that he’s told you ten percent more than he has to,” said Barbara Walters. In social settings, or in offhand comments that he implicitly understood would remain off the record, he would be surprisingly revealing, especially in his descriptions of personalities. Even for veteran pundits used to the proximity to power, the stroking was a heady experience.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Kissinger had friends in the media simply by dint of a calculated courtship. Journalists naturally liked him, and enjoyed talking to him, for the same reasons that so many others found him fascinating. He was well-informed and liked to share information. His wit had a sharpness that journalists found bracing. At dinners he was charming, in interviews he was thoughtful, and as a storyteller he had an eye for color and detail that reporters could appreciate.
Nevertheless, the shuttles were probably, on balance, a good use of Kissinger’s talent. His weakness as a manager was matched by his indefatigable resourcefulness as a mediator and his understanding that in diplomacy, as in design, God is in the details.
With great conviction, he would portray to each side, in the most graphic terms, the dire consequences of failure. Each day they dithered, Kissinger would warn the Israelis, the more likely it would be that the PLO would get into the process, that the American public would get fed up, that a war would start that they would have to fight without an American airlift. On the other hand, he would tell Sadat that if war broke out, “the Pentagon will strike at you.” The Syrians were given a similar picture of their lack of options other than a settlement; there was no other way to get the Israelis to withdraw. “What are your alternatives?” he would ask each side over and over again.
With the Israelis, whose concessions he needed most, Kissinger was particularly vidid in analyzing the situation in historic terms, conjuring up visions of apocalypse and global isolation if they remained recalcitrant. The negotiators in Jerusalem developed a mock lexicon of Kissinger’s pessimism. When he called a course “suicidal,” he meant it was difficult. “Impossible” translated as “unlikely.” “Difficult” meant “achievable.” And when he said, “I’ll see what I can do,” it meant, “I’ve already gotten that concession from them but haven’t told you yet.”
Commenting on Metternich’s negotiating style, Talleyrand cited “his marvelous command of words that are vague and void of meaning.” Kissinger shared that talent. “Sometimes, the art of diplomacy is to keep the obvious obscured,” he once said.
In discussing deviousness in foreign policy, Kissinger once wrote that “I tended to share Metternich’s view that in a negotiation the perfectly straightforward person was the most difficult to deal with.” Judging from Metternich’s actions, it is not clear that he actually held this view. Nor is it clear that Kissinger did. “Kissinger had a Metternichian system of telling only half the truth,” said Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin. “He didn’t lie. He would have lost credibility. He didn’t tell the whole truth.”
“If you didn’t listen word by word, you could be carried away by what he said. But if you listened word by word, he wasn’t lying. With due respect to Kissinger, he is the most devious man I’ve ever met.”
“In negotiations, if you put down specific proposals before you know where you’re going, it’s almost suicidal.” He loved the way the Chinese negotiated: they first determined a reasonable solution that accommodated each side’s basic principles, then they would get there in one jump. Concessions were made voluntarily, rather than in response to pressure, thus inviting reciprocity.
If it fails, we’ll call it the Sisco Plan. If it succeeds, we will call it the Kissinger Plan.
Kissinger later told a joke about Brezhnev’s trying to convince his mother that he had become the Soviet leader. To overcome her skepticism, he took here on a tour of his realm at Zavidovo with the boats and cars and grand lodge and pool and theater. She was finally convinced. “This is wonderful, Leonid Ilyich,” she said, “but what are you going to do when the Communists take over?”
The underlying truth to the joke, in Kissinger’s mind, was that the Soviet Union should no longer be perceived as a revolutionary state. Unlike China, it did not continually stoke the flames of ideological zeal. Instead, it had become, at least during the 1970s, an empire dedicated to the self-preservation of a party bureaucracy. In his dissertation and early writings, Kissinger explained the difficulty in dealing with revolutionary states; but dealing with the Soviets, he felt, was now possible.
Once everyone else was gone, Brezhnev pointed to a picnic hamper and bellowed one of his favorite sayings, “Enjoy good things in life with impunity.” Out came loaves of dark bread, sausages, hard-boiled eggs, a bag of salt, and a large bottle of vodka.
Brezhnev began to talk about his childhood, his rise through the Communist Party hierarchy, his experience in the Great War. He stressed how important peace was to him, and to the Soviet people. But rather abruptly, he then lurched into a lecture on China that clearly had been carefully planned.
The Chinese were treacherous barbarians, Brezhnev said as they sat in the cozy hunting tower. Now they were building nuclear weapons, and something had to be done. It seemed to Kissinger that Brezhnev was seeking tacit American approval for a preemptive Soviet strike against China. Having watched Brezhnev’s method of hunting, Kissinger steered clear of the bait. The situation with China, he replied carefully, “was one of those problems that underlined the importance of settling disputes peacefully.”
Men become myths not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but by the tasks they set for themselves.
One of Nixon’s maxims was that if you had to use force, you would get no points for showing restraint. Once a decision had been made to apply military muscle, it was best to go all out. And he did. Agreeing heartily with Haig, he ordered that every possible B-52 bomber available - 129 in all - be sent to Vietnam for a relentless series of daily assaults, beginning on December 18, on targets in Hanoi, Haiphong, and elsewhere.
Insolence is the armor of the weak.
At least six times in his memoirs, Kissinger referred to Thieu and his aids as “insolent,” just as he did to Le Duc Tho. The use of this word implies a perceived inferior, or an uppity puppet. Likewise, Kissinger’s memoirs are enriched by his insights into the national character of various peoples, but his descriptions of the Vietnamese veer close to ethnic insults. In recounting his August meeting, he writes that Thieu “fought with characteristic Vietnamese opaqueness and with a cultural arrogance.”
Arbatov’s most important piece of advice was that the way to Kissinger’s heart was through his ego. “He has a huge ego, and you can use it,” Arbatov said. “Stroke him, treat him as a special person, deal with him as if he were an equal and not just a presidential assistant.” For four days Brezhnev tried to do just that, although he was never able to dazzle and fascinate Kissinger the way that Zhou and Mao could. Instead, he struck Kissinger as rather cloddish and thick.
We are clearly living through one of the most difficult periods of our history. Some say we are divided over Vietnam; others blame domestic discord. But I believe that the cause of our anguish is deeper. Throughout our history, we believed that effort was its own reward. Partly because so much has been achieved here in America, we tended to suppose that every problem must have a solution, and that good intentions should somehow guarantee good results. Utopia was seen not as a dream, but as our logical destination if we only traveled the right road. Our generation is the first to find that the road is endless, that in traveling it we will not find utopia but only ourselves. The realization of our essential loneliness accounts for so much of the frustration and the rage of our time.
Ego is really just a compensation for an inferiority complex.
The reverse was also true: women tended to be attracted to him. A poll of Playboy Club bunnies in 1972 ranked him number one as “the man I would most like to go out on a date with.” His explanation for the phenomenon was that women were turned on by his power. As he had said in one of his most famous lines: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Kissinger’s secret with women was not all that different from his one with men whom he wanted to charm: he flattered them, he listened to them, he nodded a lot, and he made eye contact. But unlike the way he was with most men, Kissinger was exceedingly patient with women who wanted to talk. “Very few men in the 1970s actually listened to women,” according to Bette Lord. “Henry talked to you seriously and probed for what you knew or thought.” He was someone who could, and would, make a Jill St. John feel intelligent or a Shirley MacLaine feel politically savvy. “Next to Ingmar Bergman, he is the most interesting man I have ever met,” said Liv Ullmann. “He is surrounded by a fascinating aura, a strange field of light, and he catches you in some kind of invisible net.”
In a friendly way, she criticized him for making such a frivolous public display “while our boys in Vietnam are getting their heads shot off.”
Kissinger suddenly darkened. “Miss Miller,” he said, no longer called her Ann, “you don’t know anything about me. I was miserable in a marriage for most of my life. I never had any fun. Now is my chance to enjoy myself. When this administration goes out, I’m going back to being a professor. But while I’m in the position I’m in, I’m damn well going to make it count.”
In Washington, like other one-industry towns, social status tends to be a function of professional position rather than family heritage. The inhabitants will tolerate almost any social lapse except for a fall from power. A foreign policy expert, for example, even one with Roman numerals after his name, may have some personal friendships during the time he spends ensconced at the Brookings Institution, but only during those years when he is an assistant secretary or name-brand journalist will he have a true A-list social life.
Since social standing is so dependent on power, a backwash effect occurs: social visibility becomes a way to enhance the appearance of power. This is important, because power in Washington - who’s up, who’s down - is largely a game of perceptions. Consequently, the appearance of power is a large component of the reality of power.
At the pinnacle of the social pyramid during Kissinger’s day were a handful of venerable columnists and editors, a few stentorian yet socially amusing senators, a rotating crew of White House aides, and some elegant and tart-tongued widows of fondly remembered eminences. The geographic center of this world was the thirty-square-block core of Georgetown, known for colonial brick townhouses and dinner parties that ended by ten P.M. Here in the evening, the machinery of governance was lubricated, alliances formed, potential adversaries co-opted, stories planted, deals intimated, pulses taken, power calibrated.
Georgetown’s social scene had been stagnant since the Kennedy years, and with Nixon’s election the village hostesses searched desperately for some interesting new characters. As the most colorful and socially eager of the new White House aides, the Bavarian among the Prussians, Kissinger was quickly adopted. He had a good mind, a lot of charm, a desire to please, and a talent for sharing confidences that was admired in such salons. “Henry was the only interesting one in the new White House,” recalled Barbara Howar. “And he played it to a hilt. So this little, round, obscure professor who claims to be a secret swinger became the darling of the Georgetown set.”
His social world was dominated by the media elite that Nixon so despised. There was columnist Joseph Alsop and his sharp, sophisticated wife, Susan Mary.
Yet he had the ingredients to be a political celebrity in the 1970s: power, flair, a fingertip feel for publicity, and above all a sense of presence. “He had the quality of being at the center of wherever he stood,” Kissinger once said of Mao. “It moved with him whenever he moved.” Aware of this aura in others - in addition to Mao, he saw it in Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson, Anwar Sadat, John Kennedy, and John Connally - Kissinger cultivated it in himself. Hugh Sidey was once allowed to observe a Nixon cabinet session. “Kissinger dominates the room without doing anything.” This heightened presence and energy helped Kissinger seem larger than life, both as statesman and celebrity.
One of the great truths about America in the media age is that celebrity translates into power. Being famous creates an aura that enhances influence. “Henry marshals everything to his goals. He realizes that fame can make him more powerful as well as the other way around.”
In his report to Nixon afterward, Kissinger took care to paint a vivid portrait of Zhou. “He was equally at home in his philosophic sweeps, historical analysis, tactical probing, light repartee,” he wrote in a description that also fit himself. Zhou’s ability to dominate a room came not from his physical presence but from “his air of controlled tension” that made him seem “as if he were a coiled spring.” His expressive face was dominated by piercing eyes that conveyed a mixture of intensity, wariness, and self-confidence. He wore with grace an inner serenity, as well as a disciplined fervor, the burden of his role as Mao’s only premier in the twenty-two years since the communists had controlled China.
Over the course of two days, Kissinger would hold seventeen hours of talks with Zhou. Their sessions would last up to seven hours at a stretch. Yet Zhou had that peculiar grace of all truly masterful leaders - a quality that Kissinger conspicuously lacked - of never seeming harried, never being interrupted, never giving the impression of having something more pressing to tend to, and never needing to take a phone call, despite his duties of running the world’s largest nation. “I do not know how he managed it,” Kissinger later marveled.
Kissinger argued the opposite: the best way to avoid a real fight would be to escalate rapidly and even with apparent recklessness. “Nixon and I held that if we wished to avoid confrontation with the Soviets, we had to create rapidly a calculus of risks the would be unwilling to confront, rather than let them slide into the temptation to match our gradual moves,” Kissinger recalled. He would later claim that the main lesson he learned from Nixon was that a leader “must be prepared to escalate rapidly and brutally to a point where the opponent can no longer afford to experiment.” For Kissinger and Nixon, this was one of the lessons of America’s failure in Vietnam.
Opinions therefore gyrated randomly in a conversational style,” Kissinger recalled. There was a discussion of whether the Soviet action violated the 1962 understandings. That was irrelevant, argued Kissinger, who had little patience with the American penchant for taking a legalistic approach to situations. The 1962 missile crisis occurred not because the Soviets had done something illegal, he reminded them, but because they had done something that was contrary to US national interests. The current case was similar.
The debate showed how hard it often is for American policymakers to deal with ambiguous, gray-area challenges. Instead, they prefer to wish them away. In this case that would have been easy, since the Soviet action was not all that threatening. But unless it was stopped resolutely, Kissinger felt, the incremental challenges would continue and become even harder to oppose.
Historians naturally treat the world in an unnatural way, plucking a particular event or crisis out of context, analyzing it, then moving on to the next one, even if they were in reality all jumbled up.
This approach is particularly problematic when analyzing Kissinger, whose greatest strength and occasional weakness as a global strategist was his tendency to see or imagine linkages that connected far-flung events. In his mind, for example, the events of September 1970 - Chile, Cuba, Jordan, Vietnam - were related to a pattern of Soviet conduct designed to test the resolve of the US.
These were his old friends, but they left embittered. “The meeting completed my transition from the academic world,” said Kissinger. What bothered him was not their opposition, but their “lack of compassion, the overweening righteousness, the refusal to offer an alternative.” The wounds of this meeting were not healed even by the end of the war.
“You guys think I’m kidding when I say this, but I’ll resign.”
“If you quit, Henry,” said Safire, “you’ll never get a phone call from a beautiful woman again. The secret of your attraction is your proximity to power.”
“You may be right about that, Safire,” said Kissinger, who even amid a tantrum was unusually willing to consider a humorous or intriguing proposition. Power, as he had often noted, was the ultimate aphrodisiac. “It would be a tremendous sacrifice.”
One reason for keeping decisions to small groups is that when bureaucracies are so unwieldy and when their internal morale becomes a serious problem, an unpopular decision may be fought by brutal means, such as leaks to the press or to Congressional committees. Thus the only way secrecy can be kept is to exclude from the making of the decision all those who are theoretically charged with carrying it out.
Indeed, the aides who survived his petulant tantrums and tyrannies discovered that Kissinger’s was one of the few staffs in Washington where independent thinking was prized and sycophancy was not. Kissinger’s insecurities were easily triggered, and his intellectual arrogance could be overbearing. Yet he liked to be challenged on substance, and he enjoyed a solid analytic argument. Which is why, when important decisions were being made, he did not seal himself off like Nixon, but instead sought out the most assertive minds on his staff and made them feel, at least for a moment, that working for him was worthwhile.
This sense of intellectual excitement and challenge, along with the charismatic power of Kissinger’s brilliance, was what earned him the loyalty of those beleaguered staffers who could put up with his demanding personality. As a result, he was able to extract great work from some of Washington’s best minds. On one occasion, Winston Lord was assigned to write a thirty-thousand-word report on the 1970 Cambodian invasion. A day before it was due to the president, Kissinger read it and hurled it to the floor, declaring it “completely worthless.” Lord stayed up all night rewriting it; the next day Kissinger pronounced it “great.” Lord later said that he had not made that many changes, but it was Kissinger’s way of driving him to do the best job he could. Roger Morris recalled Kissinger calling him at midnight to say, “I’ve read your draft. B-plus. You’re only one draft away from an A-minus.”
One oft-told tale about Kissinger, which was similar to one told about his old professor William Yandell Elliiott, involved a report that Winston Lord had worked for days. After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation “Is this the best that you can do?” Lord rewrote it and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came the same question from Kissinger - Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do.” To which Kissinger replied: “Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time.”
For better or worse, there was no one else in the bureaucracy who would hold his staff, and himself, to such high standards or demand that such effort go into making each report so perfect.
“He didn’t like large meetings because he didn’t want people to form factions and confront him,” said Sonnefeldt. “He created a bond by sharing confidences and making snide comments about everyone else.”
By dealing with aides and colleagues privately, Kissinger could create a sense of intimacy. He would lead people to believe that they were among the few people he could trust, among the few who would understand the sensitive information he was about to impart. “Henry used to tell me I was the only person at State with a capacity for conceptual thinking,” said Elliot Richardson. “Henry would say that I was the only journalist he couldn’t manipulate,” said Henry Brandon.
It was all extremely charming. “I have never met a man with greater powers of seduction,” recalled Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He was not only charming and witty, but he made me feel I was a person whose advice and assistance he uniquely sought.”
With so many insatiable egos in government, Kissinger’s finesse at flattery found fertile territory.
“He was always telling me how smart I was, how much the president relied on me,” Connally later said. “He was damn good at it, and I know, because I had some experience in that field myself.”
The guerrilla wins if we does not lose. The conventional army loses if he does not win. After the Tet offensive, it became clear the war was unwinnable, or to use Kissinger’s ore circumspect language, the US “could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”
The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam. What is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear the actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness… In many parts of the world - the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan - stability depends on confidence in American promises.
As the world groped its way into the nuclear age, the traditional methods of asserting national power - such as controlling more territory, forging new alliances, and adding to the arsenals - were becoming less meaningful. The main way that a nuclear power could enhance its global clout was to increase the credibility of its commitments. Power thus depended on perception - about a nation’s will and believability of its threat - than on military might.
There’s no way to win this war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say just the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.
Nixon, more relaxed than Kissinger had ever seen him, pointed out that landmarks of his young life and discussed the random events that had led him to become a politician.
“The guiding theme of his discourse,” Kissinger later recalled, “was how it had all been accidental.” But Kissinger saw in it a different theme, that of an insecure man who lacked a strong sense of who he was and where he came from. “Nixon had set himself a goal beyond human capacity: to make himself over entirely,” Kissinger later wrote. “But the gods exacted a fearful price for this presumption. Nixon paid, first, the price of congenital insecurity. And ultimately he learned what the Greeks had known: that the worst punishment can be having one’s wishes filled too completely.”
Kissinger’s previous patrons - Kraemer, Elliott, Rockefeller - had been grand personas, commanding in style, larger than life in presence. But as Kissinger discovered at their meeting at the Pierre, Nixon was unprepossessing, weak, lacking in presence. He struck Kissinger as a Walter Mitty type, a person who spun out fantasies of being a brave hero and whose “romantic imaginings embellished the often self-inflicted daily disappointments.”
Kissinger also came to see Nixon as a shy man, one who dreaded meeting new people or conveying a disappointing decision to someone’s face. “The essence of this man is loneliness,” Kissinger would tell friends. Nixon would hole up in his hideaway office, slump in a chair, and write notes on a yellow legal pad. For hours or even days, he would shield himself from outsiders, allowing only a small circle of aides to join him in his rambling ruminations. “He was a very odd man, an unpleasant man,” Kissinger later let slip into an open microphone at a diplomatic dinner. “He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.”
To fathom foreign policy, Kissinger has said, a person must be constantly thinking of all the connections involved, even while shaving in the morning.
Kissinger relished personal interaction; Nixon dreaded it. When Kissinger got angry, he would rage at those involved; Nixon would shrink from confrontation, avoid dealing with people, and stew about getting revenge.
When challenges arose, Kissinger became intellectually engaged, almost obsessively so; Nixon became detached, almost eerily so. Kissinger’s mind mastered details; Nixon remained aloof from even some of the major components of issues he faced. Kissinger’s analytic lucidity took him straight to the core of any problem; Nixon’s more intuitive approach led him to roll a problem around for hours on end as he brooded on various conflicting options.
In the world according to Kissinger, it was dangerous for America to abandon one of its commitments even if the nook of the globe at stake was not, in itself, a vital national security interest. If a “third-class Communist peasant state” could beat the US, he wrote in his Look article, it would “strengthen” the hand of America’s adversaries everywhere, “demoralize” allies, “lessen the credibility” of the US around the world, and cause other nations to consider shifting their allegiance to the Soviet Union.
During this period, Kissinger was refining the realpolitik philosophy that undergirded his approach to foreign policy. One of its central tenets was that a nation’s influence depends on the perception the world holds of its power and of its willingness to use power. As he explained in an analysis of the Cuban missile crisis: even if one believed that there was not much military danger in allowing the Soviets to keep their missiles in Cuba, America could not afford a weak response because that would “embolden” its adversaries, “dishearten” its allies, and diminish its “credibility.”
Although he was never much of a lothario, even when he cultivated a reputation of being one in the late 1960s, Kissinger began to flirt and joke about women more. When a friend proposed introducing him to a woman who was “very attractive but happens to be very tall,” Kissinger replied: “My ego can handle that.”
One lesson he learned was that a president does not need a lot of people who tell him what he cannot do; it is better to be one of those telling him what he can do, or at least offering preferable alternatives.
Kissinger’s conservative realpolitik was based on the principle that diplomacy cannot be divorced from the realities of force and power. But diplomacy should be divorced, Kissinger argued, from a moralistic and meddlesome concern with the internal policies of other nations. Stability is the prime goal of diplomacy. It is served when nations accept the legitimacy of the existing world order and when they act based on their national interests; it is threatened when nations embark on ideological or moral crusades.
Whenever peace - conceived as the avoidance of war - has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. A more proper goal was for stability based on an equilibrium of forces.
One day, Stoessinger asked him how would he choose between a legitimate state that pursued unjust ends and a revolutionary one that had justice on its side? Kissinger replied with a paraphrased quotation from Goethe: “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”
A “revolutionary” situation occurs when a leader such as Napoleon does not accept the legitimacy of the international order. In such cases, he argued, negotiations are futile.
In Harvard’s 350-year history, it has learned to take in stride the peculiar combination of intellectual brilliance and quirkiness that occasionally blossoms among its undergraduates. Even so, Henry Kissinger’s senior thesis is still described in awed tones.
First of all there was its sheer bulk: 383 pages, longer than any previous undergraduate thesis - or, for that matter, any subsequent one, since it prompted the “Kissinger rule” limiting any future tomes to about one-third that length. There was also its scope, nothing less than “the meaning of history.”
In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journey across the meadows has indeed followed a regular path, that one can no longer go this way or that.
The desire to reconcile an experience of freedom with a determined environment is the lament of poetry and the dilemma of philosophy.
If you have to ask, you shouldn’t.
When he arrived at the professor’s office, Elliott was busy writing. “Oh my God,” Elliott said upon looking up, “another tutee.” He quickly dispatched Kissinger by giving him a list of twenty-five books to read and telling him not to return until he had written a paper comparing Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Practical Reason.
Kissinger went to the library, checked out the books, stacked them up next to the overstuffed easy chair in the suite, and began to read. He stayed up until 2AM night after night. It took him three months to finish the paper.
Never before, the professor boomed, had any student read all the books and written such a coherent paper.
Kissinger’s letter played on a theme that would recur throughout his career: the tension that often exists, at least in his view, between morality and realism. Survival, he noted, sometimes required a disregard for moral standards what was “inconceivable” to those who had led “sheltered” lives. Kissinger contrasted the cold realist, who survives, with “the men of high morals,” who, in brutal situations, have no chance. In later years, Kissinger would sometimes equate an emphasis on morality with weakness. He could also have been describing himself when he wrote of concentration camp victims: “They have seen man from the most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious?”