Secretary of state to Nixon and Ford, the scholar-diplomat loomed larger than the policies he implemented and even the men he served
You may be forgiven for thinking that Henry Kissinger was already dead. Not because he lived to be 100 years old, but because the Kissinger centenary occasioned months of comprehensive eulogies that few people ever get in death, let alone while still living.
Last December, with both Dr. and Nancy Kissinger contracting COVID, the spectre arose that he would not see his hundredth birthday in May. He did and, true to form, turned it into an international tour-de-force, including long features in the world’s leading titles, a thousand columns — including in this space — and capped off by a triumphant valedictory return to Beijing to celebrate Richard Nixon’s opening to China, Kissinger’s signature foreign policy achievement.
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It was altogether too much for those who rendered an emphatically negative view of Kissinger’s career; the centennial clearly exasperated those who hated him. Rolling Stone gave expression to the latter by headlining a lengthy indictment within hours of his death: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”
Kissinger was “revered and reviled” as the obituaries usually put it. It was a remarkable testament to Kissinger’s longevity and celebrity that the excesses of American Indochina policy — the clandestine bombing of Cambodia above all — came to be uniquely associated with him, rather than the presidents he served or the Democratic administrations that got into Vietnam in the first place. He loomed larger than the policies he implemented and even the men he served.
What then, finally, is to be said about Kissinger, the German Jew whose family fled Germany ahead of Kristallnacht, only to return as an American soldier in 1944, fighting with his adopted homeland for the liberation of his native land? Who then became a scholarly historian of strategic issues before commanding the great offices of state? Who, then, after leaving office in 1977, spent 46 years simply being Henry Kissinger?
Kissinger was identified with realpolitik, the view that the prosecution of the Cold War, and broader foreign policy, was to be driven by advancing national interests, prioritizing national security, the balance of power and economic concerns over the ideals of liberty, democracy and human rights.
Yet that is too simple. His official biographer, Niall Ferguson, entitled his first volume “The Idealist,” contending that Kissinger argued for idealism in foreign policy before he became national security adviser under Nixon. Idealist-out-of-office while realist-in-office is a plausible reading.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Kissinger would have accepted a return to office had he been asked. He undertook a “private” tour of Middle East capitals between Reagan’s election and inauguration, a not very subtle job application. Reagan kept him at a distance; Kissinger was the kind of Rockefeller Republican that the anti-communist right thought was too soft on the Soviets.
So it was something of a surprise when Kissinger took to The New York Times in 1982, lambasting Reagan’s foreign policy as being, well, too soft on the Soviets after the imposition of martial law in Poland. He lamented that “freedom-loving Poles” had looked in vain for help from the West.
The man who secretly went to Beijing to speak with Mao’s regime now argued that “the United States, early in the Polish crisis, (should have) declared a moratorium on high-level contacts with the Soviet Union until martial law was lifted in Poland, the Solidarity leaders were released, and the military rulers began some form of discourse with the Church and the (labour) union.”
Kissinger’s longevity means that it is easy to forget such moments. Was Kissinger’s critique of Reagan from the right a return to his early idealism? Or was it a plea that Kissinger should now be trusted by the anti-communist conservatives now in office? With Kissinger, it was almost always a combination of both, and other factors.
Among Kissinger’s achievements — and it is striking that they are viewed as “his” achievements, rather than those of Nixon or Gerald Ford — little remarked upon now are the Helsinki Accords of 1975. They were denounced by anticommunists at the time as foolish détente-driven diplomacy.
In fact, in persuading the Soviet Union to sign an agreement for human rights — the famous “Basket III” — Kissinger unwittingly introduced a key idealist principle into Cold War diplomacy. Reagan and Pope John Paul II would wield Helsinki to great effect, amplifying their anti-communist view that the goal was not to manage the Cold War but to win it.
In his post-office role as the Kissinger phenomenon, the scholar diplomat returned to the themes of his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, The Meaning of History, which examined the role of free will and determinism in the affairs of nations and states. Both the realist and idealist views have their role, the 27-year-old Kissinger had demonstrated in a dissertation so long that Harvard subsequently introduced limits for length.
In his latter years, Kissinger became more sensitive to the cultural — and perhaps religious — dimension of history. His last book, Leadership, lauded leaders who were animated by a “transcendent” vision, not just the cool management of mundane interests.
In his comments on the Russia-Ukraine war — which began more in the realist mode and shifted toward idealism — Kissinger lamented that Russian policy was being made by people who had never read Dostoevsky and so did not understand Russia’s “mystical” view of her identity. The challenge is to create ways for Russia to live that self-understanding while respecting the sovereignty of its neighbours.
To Kissinger could be applied Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes.” There are those who are too shallow to recognize grand themes; Kissinger had the depth to recognize many all at once.
Kissinger concluded that holders of great office begin with a stock of intellectual capital and nearly all of them exhaust it while in office, there being little time for serious reading and study. We see abundantly today the consequence of leaders who have no intellectual capital to begin with.
Kissinger’s capital increased with age, so much so that he wrote a book, improbably at age 98, on artificial intelligence, exploring again the question of free will and determinism. He possessed in abundance natural intelligence, which he deployed in the service of his country in the messiness of the multitudes in history.
National Post
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