(On the occasion of Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday, I am sharing this review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Kissinger that first appeared in The Review of Politics in 1994.)
Walter Isaacson: Kissinger: A Biography. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Pp. 893. $30.00.)
If, as Henry Kissinger once confided, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, then few men have more fully or openly surrendered themselves to its seductions than America’s most celebrated statesman of recent decades. Walter Isaacson’s entertaining biography offers an intimate glimpse into Kissinger’s lifelong love affair with power politics.
Isaacson follows Kissinger life from his childhood in Germany, through his rise to power during the Nixon era and, finally, to his most recent roles as media pundit and business entrepreneur. Opinions about Henry Kissinger, pro or con, are often strongly held. In contrast with many previous treatments, Isaacson strikes a careful balance in his portrayal of the man. Avoiding caricature, the author’s tone is neither fawning nor condemnatory.
Isaacson pays tribute to Kissinger’s intellectual brilliance and lauds his principal achievements, including the initiation of detente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China. Kissinger is credited with preserving American power and engagement with the world at a time when the domestic mood tilted dangerously toward isolationism.
Yet there remains plenty of grist here for Kissinger’s many critics. Although Isaacson’s own judgments are rather reserved, perhaps overly so, the overall portrait he paints is hardly a flattering one. Kissinger emerges as a deeply flawed character, guilty of overweening ambition and capable of needless cruelty. While his record in power includes significant accomplishments, the overall legacy seems less profound or lasting in hindsight.
Isaacson emphasizes the degree to which the nation’s diplomacy came to reflect Kissinger’s own personal style and beliefs. Yet, owing to Kissinger’s multiple personas, the relationship was seldom simple. There was Kissinger the grand geopolitical thinker, his mind ranging across sweeping historical generalizations, Kissinger the tireless diplomat, wearing down negotiating partners with his tireless command of detail, and Kissinger the petty manipulator, obsessed with perceived slights and endlessly engaged in devious bureaucratic games.
Despite his well-deserved reputation for imperious arrogance, Kissinger suffered from deep-seated insecurities. He craved the approval of others and felt compelled to explain himself to his critics. While tyrannical toward his subordinates and manipulative toward his peers, Kissinger often indulged in displays of obsequious deference toward his superiors. Kissinger sought out a series of mentors over the years including Fritz Kraemer, his army superior, William Elliot, his graduate adviser at Harvard, Nelson Rockefeller, his early political patron, and Richard Nixon, his White House boss.
Kissinger’s relationship with Nixon was tortuous. Among his subordinates, Kissinger spoke of Nixon with undisguised contempt. While admiring Nixon’s courage and perseverance, Kissinger considered the president a lonely and pathetic figure who lived in a Walter Mitty-like world of se!f delusion. Yet Kissinger was the ultimate courtier in Nixon’s presence. Kissinger suffered Nixon’s anti-Semitic remarks without complaint and ingratiated himself with his boss by reinforcing Nixon’s paranoid fears and embracing the cult of toughness that Nixon so fervently preached. He spent many hours stroking Nixon’s fragile ego and assiduously sought to monopolize Nixon’s access to foreign policy advice.
Kissinger’s political philosophy, his personality and his diplomatic practice were all driven by political realism, a doctrine which provided the intellectual and spiritual core of Kissinger’s life. Isaacson traces his embrace of realism to Kissinger’s childhood experiences. As a Jewish boy growing up in Germany, Kissinger witnessed the chaotic disintegration of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. This left him with a deep appreciation for the values of order, stability and legitimacy. Pessimistic about human nature, Kissinger rejected the liberal belief in the inevitability of progress. He viewed power, not moral ideals, as the driving force of history. The role of the statesman was to maneuver within the confines of choice carved out by the objective forces of historical movement. He thus rejected the extremes of either historical determinism or limitless free will.
Kissinger’s brand of realism could take brutal form. Adopting a globalist viewpoint that took scant account of local realities, Kissinger saw every affront to American power as a Soviet-inspired test of U.S. resolve. Only an unblinking demonstration of strength could preserve American credibility. This hard-nosed perspective lay behind Kissinger’s endorsement of the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the campaign to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and U.S. aid to rebel factions in Angola. Kissinger’s sometimes appalling moral blindness was evident in his long-held (though eventually reversed) backing of the white minority regime in South Africa and his support for continued military assistance to Indonesia despite its bloody invasion and suppression of neighboring East Timor.
Nixon, of course, shared Kissinger’s fondness for realpolitik. Both embraced a paranoid view of the world that took various forms, including, eventually, a large measure of distrust and jealousy toward one another. Nixon and Kissinger’s secretiveness, along with their contempt for both the Congress and the foreign affairs bureaucracy, are legendary. Isaacson argues, perhaps correctly, that a degree of secrecy and surprise were necessary to the success of some of the administration’s principal initiatives. If pursued openly through formal channels, it is unlikely that either the initial steps toward detente with the Soviet Union or the opening to China would have survived bureaucratic or congressional resistance.
Yet secrecy and the banishment of expertise each exacted their price. Relying upon his own backchannel to bypass the formal U.S. bargaining team, Kissinger bungled crucial aspects of the SALT I negotiations and provided the Soviets with the opportunity to play the two channels against one another. In the 1 971 India-Pakistan war, Kissinger insisted, against accurate State Department advice to the contrary, upon viewing India as a Soviet proxy. Kissinger’s subsequent tilt toward the brutal Pakistani regime had tragic consequences.
Nixon and Kissinger’s obsession with secrecy had other costs as well. Concerned about leaks, especially with regard to the secret bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger ordered wiretaps placed upon his closest aides. Although not directly implicated in subsequent events, Kissinger’s frantic reaction to the release of the Pentagon Papers encouraged Nixon to authorize formation of the infamous Plumber’s Unit. The paranoid atmosphere inside the Nixon administration often reached comical extremes. Cut off from vital information by Kissinger, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird used the National Security Agency to intercept Kissinger’s backchannel messages while Navy Chief of Staff Elmo Zumwalt went so far as to place a personal spy within Kissinger’s inner circle.
When not engaged in petty machinations, Nixon and Kissinger did manage to infuse U.S. foreign policy with a rare degree of intellectual and strategic vision. They sought to construct a structure of peace built upon the triangular relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Kissinger hoped that America’s pivotal role in this tripolar diplomacy would serve to constrain Soviet behavior while preserving U.S. power during a period of underlying decline. The audacity and ingenuity of this attempt to rearrange the global balance of power was breathtaking.
Yet Isaacson notes that Nixon and Kissinger’s structure of peace lacked solidity. The complexities of Kissinger’s strategy of linkage proved overwhelming. Most importantly, domestic obstacles, including but not limited to Watergate, interfered with Kissinger’s grand geopolitical scheme. Kissinger oversold detente to the public and his instinctive secrecy and distrust of democracy eventually led to a backlash against his style of diplomacy. The nation turned first to Jimmy Carter’s moralism and later to Ronald Reagan’s ideological anticommunism. Isaacson observes that while Kissinger often defended peace and order as moral imperatives in themselves, he never understood the desire of most Americans that their country stand for some set of higher ideals and purposes. Kissinger’s realism, for all its intellectual appeal, proved out of sync with the American character.
Isaacson’s biography usefully illustrates how a single strong-wil!ed personality can, for better or worse, leave a distinctive imprint on the foreign policy of a major power. ln the tradition of Otto von Bismarck, his nineteenth-century twin, Kissinger attempted to rise above history by manipulating antagonisms at home and abroad. Like circus showmen, both Bismarck and Kissinger amazed audiences with their clever balancing acts. Yet while each mastered events for a time, neither succeeded in deflecting the movement of deeper historical forces beyond the reach of realist analysis or the will of individual humans.
The Internationalist 