INTRODUCTION: HENRY KISSINGER AND AMERICAN POWER
WHEN I FINALLY GOT THE OPPORTUNITY to interview Henry Kissinger, and made my way through security into his Park Avenue office, the former secretary of state asked me what type of book I had planned. I told him I hoped to write a “short and concise” biography, using his career as a prism through which to explore the modern history of American diplomacy. Looking somewhat puzzled, he replied, in his inimitable German accent, “But you will leave things out.”
Henry Kissinger is the most famous American diplomat of the twentieth century. He may well be one of the most heavily documented public figures in American history. He wrote not only three volumes totaling four thousand pages of memoirs, but also other books, articles, speeches, and op-eds that would fill several library shelves. When I began my research, the late Harry Howe Ransom, a Vanderbilt University colleague who had worked with Kissinger in the 1950s, joked that “Henry never had an unpublished thought.” As Kissinger continues his commentary on American foreign policy well into a seventh decade, Ransom may well be right. As national security adviser and secretary of state, Kissinger left an unprecedented paper trail of memoranda of conversations, policy papers, and telephone conversations that record almost every day of his eight years in office. His presence is also significant in the 3,700 hours of the Nixon tapes. Indeed, it was a formidable challenge to write anything “short and concise” about Henry Kissinger.
For these reasons it may be best to start out with explaining what this book isn’t. This book is not a full biography of Kissinger the man, and it is not an attempt to make conclusions about his family life and personal relationships. The historian Niall Ferguson has undertaken that project, with the cooperation of Kissinger, and Ferguson has access to Kissinger’s personal papers.1 I have used Ferguson’s first volume for my opening chapter, supplemented with materials I have discovered in my own research. Ferguson treats many of the personal matters of Kissinger’s life before 1969 with great delicacy.2 Still, his work is extremely important for the light it sheds on such topics as Kissinger’s first years in the United States, his service during and after World War II, and his role in Vietnam negotiations before becoming national security adviser.
My book is also not an attempt to review every claim, accusation, and historical argument that has been made about Henry Kissinger. Covering the wide array of secondary literature about Kissinger would take a small army of historians. Although I make a number of judgments about Kissinger’s diplomacy and political behavior, I shy away from the thundering moral pronouncements of condemnation that are commonplace among academics and political activists. Writing dispassionately about a man whom some call a war criminal and lump together with figures like Slobodan Miloševic or Pol Pot is not easy. Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow indicts Kissinger for not only the actions he took while in power but also the “endless wars” that have characterized American foreign policy ever since.3 This strikes me as excessive—Kissinger has enough to answer for during the time he actually held governing responsibility. His advocacy of policies as a private citizen is worth studying, but making him responsible for every military action the United States has taken since 1977 is playing into Kissinger’s own sense of self-importance. Neither do I find myself as taken with the claims of many of Kissinger’s admirers, from his contemporary portrayal as “Super K” to the narratives of some establishment politicians and pundits who argue that Kissinger was the “20th century’s greatest 19th-century statesman.”4 The extreme praise and vilification Kissinger receives does little to provide any real understanding of the historical role he has played, or the consequences and legacy of his public life and career. 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.
This book aims to reintroduce Henry Kissinger to the American people and to an international audience. It is not quite the “short and concise” book I had hoped it would be. It is much shorter than it would have been had I delved into every aspect of Kissinger’s role in foreign policy. There are still many Americans, mostly now sixty and over, who well remember Kissinger. In the mid-1970s he ranked as the most admired American, enjoying close to universal acclaim. In the dawning age of globalization, he was internationally famous, one of the most recognizable figures on the planet. For a younger generation of Americans, the students I teach, Henry Kissinger is not very well known or understood. This book is written for them, as an attempt to explain who Henry Kissinger was, what he thought, what he did, and why it matters. Kissinger was an immensely powerful and important figure during a critical period in recent American history, and his career reflects on many of the enduring and important questions connected to U.S. foreign policy.
Copyright © 2020 by Thomas A. Schwartz
