“Surely no statesman in modern times, and certainly no American secretary of state, has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger” (p. 1). With this, Niall Ferguson opens his expansive new biography.
In American politics, however, the reverse just might be true. We are a long way from the 1976 presidential election, when Jimmy Carter repeatedly denounced Kissinger's “covert, manipulative, and deceptive” foreign policy (quoted in various documents, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library). Since the end of the Cold War, meeting with Kissinger has been a public relations ritual for presidents and aspirants—a stamp of institutional legitimacy, intellectual rigor, and diplomatic dispassion from America's elder realist. Hillary Clinton wrote a glowing review of Kissinger's World Order shortly after stepping down from the State Department in 2015 and later bragged about their relationship in a Democratic primary debate. Even Donald Trump finagled a meeting, also boasting that Kissinger endorsed his ideas.
Thus it is jarring to hear Ferguson—Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard—remind us of the “visceral hostility that the name Henry Kissinger arouses” (p. 10). For him the main culprits are “hysterical” journalists who “now freely bandy about terms like ‘mass murderer,’ ‘killer,’ and ‘monster’ when Henry Kissinger's name comes up” (p. 14).
Yet Kissinger has not just been slandered; he has also been misunderstood—profoundly, according to Ferguson, by not only journalists but also the many diplomatic historians who have analyzed Kissinger the statesman and, in several recent biographies, Kissinger the man (Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect [2004]; Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger [2007]; Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century [2007]; Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist [2009]; Greg Grandin, Kissinger's Shadow [2015]). Even his more sympathetic critics and biographers have shared one unshakable truth: the “deeply rooted . . . view of Kissinger as an amoral realist—a ‘hard-boiled master of realpolitik who will not sacrifice one iota of American interest’” (p. 21).
Ferguson's argument is equally counterintuitive and revisionist. “Far from being a Machiavellian realist,” he claims, “Henry Kissinger was in fact from the outset of his career an idealist” (p. 28). Ferguson insists that he is “using the term ‘idealism’ in its philosophical sense,” which, quoting Kant, he summarizes as the view that “‘we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining’ because ‘the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof’” (p. 28). Later on, Ferguson expands “idealism” beyond the philosophical to accommodate his argument (more on that below), but he does suggest that Kissinger's reading of Kant “made him skeptical of the various materialist theories of capitalist superiority that U.S. social scientists devised as antidotes to Marxism-Leninism” (p. 29).
The contours of Kissinger's life are familiar terrain. First, there are his beginnings as the son of a middle-class Jewish schoolteacher in the historically tolerant, though segregated, small German town of Fürth. Most biographers have alleged a connection between Kissinger's childhood in Nazi Germany (he left Fürth with his parents for New York City in 1938, aged fifteen) and a future preference for world order and skepticism of democracy—an explanation that Ferguson, and Kissinger himself, rejects.
Ferguson proposes a different starting point for Kissinger's philosophy: his time in the U.S. Army. He reproduces in full “The Eternal Jew,” a remarkable condemnation of twentieth-century notions of progress and freedom penned by a twenty-two-year-old Kissinger shortly after he had participated in the liberation of Ahlem concentration camp. “You are free now,” Kissinger tells “the empty faces, the dead eyes” of the barely alive prisoners. “I, with my pressed uniform, I haven't lived in filth and squalor, I haven't been beaten and kicked. What kind of freedom can I offer?” (p. 167).
The chapters on Kissinger's childhood and army service are Ferguson's best, and his argument against earlier interpretations of these years is persuasive. However, Ferguson's central claim—that instead of a foreign policy realist, Kissinger is a philosophical idealist—is constructed as a false opposite. Ferguson emphatically rejects using idealism “in the sense in which the word is often used to characterize the tradition in U.S. foreign policy that emphasized the subordination of ‘might’ to supranational laws and courts” (p. 28). But those who describe Kissinger as a realist are using that term in a foreign policy sense, and demonstrating his qualifications as a philosophical idealist does not necessarily disallow him from being a foreign policy realist—a much broader club in international relations theory than Ferguson allows.
This confusion becomes clear in Ferguson's discussion of Kissinger's views during the 1961 Berlin Crisis. Kissinger's “insist[ence] on the applicability of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination”—as opposed to President Kennedy's willingness to negotiate over Berlin's status—is taken to demonstrate “the distinction between [Kennedy's] realism and [Kissinger's] idealism” (p. 513). Yet Ferguson also admits that “Kissinger's argument for reunification was not ingenuous” (p. 498). The West should push for reunification, Kissinger wrote during the crisis, on the basis of several “immutable” conditions—“not because this would be acceptable in Moscow but precisely because it would be rejected” (p. 498). In other words, Kissinger was no more prepared to risk war over Berlin than was Kennedy; at stake was not self-determination per se, but American legitimacy in Western Europe. This is hardly the “antithesis of realism” that Ferguson insists it is (p. 431).
Ferguson makes an important argument against the “technocrats who infested the Pentagon” during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, whose devotion to numbers—of bombs dropped, of dams built—obscured the political realities of the war in Vietnam (p. 583). Kissinger's “scathing” private criticisms of that mindset have aged well; in several ways his analysis in 1965 presages Robert McNamara's own thirty years later (In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam [1996]). Yet, Kissinger refused to challenge Johnson on the merits of his strategy, which Ferguson attributes, less convincingly, to a hidden desire to “salvage the situation from the inside” (p. 584).
Kissinger would not have a formal White House role until 1968, but not for a lack of trying. Ferguson praises Kissinger's “remarkable” loyalty to New York Governor and repeated presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller, who for a decade paid Kissinger out of his own pocket as a foreign policy consultant (p. 457). Yet, Ferguson's own account shows Kissinger angling at several key moments for positions with rival candidates and incumbents. Ferguson duly rejects allegations that Kissinger leaked secret information to Nixon in exchange for the National Security Advisor job, but to claim that Kissinger was “indifferent to his own career prospects” that year is simply false (p. 797).
In The Idealist, Ferguson presents an idealized Kissinger, in every way the opposite of the congenitally disloyal, shortsighted, and self-interested one his critics have conjured. Still, it is an important book that reveals much about how Heinz became Henry, idealist or not. The first half of Ferguson's argument is undeniably true: there is much more to Kissinger's “realism” than his critics have allowed. There is also much more to his morality. Ultimately, the truth of Ferguson's claims will depend on how he carries them through volume 2, covering Kissinger's six years with Nixon and two with Ford. It will be a steep climb.
