In the winter of 1948 Graham Greene arrived in the “smashed, dreary city” of Vienna to oversee work on his screenplay for The Third Man. The city was divided into four, mutually antagonistic cold war zones controlled by Russia, the US, France and Britain. Everywhere Greene went he saw evidence of the moral and material ruins of Hitler’s collapsed Reich. East-west tensions intensified later that year when Stalin began to blockade access to western Berlin. The allied forces in the city, fearing a Red takeover, improvised an airlift for Berliners. A sense of insecurity now infected every level of the White House: at Harvard, meanwhile, a young German-Jewish political scientist called Henry Kissinger contemplated Moscow’s atomic capabilities: how long before a Red Square appeared in the heart of the democratic west?
As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, Kissinger formulated his “limited nuclear war” theory. The practical way to deter Soviet aggression was to prosecute a “limited” war by counter-balancing stockpiles of weaponry. Such a war, Kissinger argued in his 1957 bestseller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, was a “realistic” alternative to the ballistic Armaggedon threatened by the first Eisenhower administration. A master of realpolitik, Kissinger saw mutual deterrence as part of a grand game of power-brokering that went back to his adored Napoleonic-era diplomats Metternich and Castlereagh (on whom he wrote a Harvard thesis). America’s rivalry with Russia fuelled Kissinger’s ambition to master statecraft from what Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (“high places”) of Washington power elites.
According to the British historian and TV presenter Niall Ferguson, Kissinger was the pre-eminent cold war intellectual; his twin career as Harvard scholar and policymaker was informed by a Le Carré-like world of wire-tapping and psychological warfare. As national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he not only masterminded nuclear detente; he opened up a trade alliance with Mao’s China and negotiated the peace agreement that finally put an end to the Vietnam war (for which, controversially, he won the 1973 Nobel peace prize). Ferguson’s 980-page biography – the first of two door-stopper volumes – is intended partly as a riposte to Christopher Hitchens, Seymour Hersh and other left-leaning journalists who accuse Kissinger of Machiavellian manoeuvrings and “crimes against humanity” in the socialist-threatened outposts of Indochina, Chile and East Timor. “Surely no statesman in modern times”, writes Ferguson, “has been as revered and then as reviled.”
Ten years in the making, the biography was written with Kissinger’s blessing, and while not hagiography, it is very admiring. Kissinger, the chaperone of glamorous women and jocularly self-styled “secret swinger”, was not always the cold, ethically compromised diplomat of legend. He could throw out wisecracks like Groucho Marx, says Ferguson. Indeed, Kissingerian repartee (“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full”) was a form of Marxian Jewish émigré wit. Born in Bavaria in 1923 to Orthodox Jewish parents, the then Heinz Kissinger was 10 when the Nazis came to power. He and his family escaped antisemitic persecution by emigrating. When Kissinger arrived in New York in 1938, he was in no doubt that Germany had departed from the community of civilised human beings. Yet he was adamant that Nazism had left no lasting psychological damage. Ferguson is not so sure.
As a counter-intelligence officer in post-Hitler Germany, Kissinger witnessed the liberation (in April 1945) of Ahlem-Hanover concentration camp. Confronted by the spectacle of naked, decomposed bodies, the 22-year-old sergeant asked himself sorrowfully: “What kind of freedom can I offer?” The Nazi camp lent a moral clarity to the war - this is what we Americans have been fighting for. Ferguson identifies at least 23 Kissinger family relatives murdered by Hitler. Returning from Germany in 1947, Kissinger concentrated on strategic studies at Harvard. Diplomatic strategy would henceforth be his forte; domestic politics left him cold.
Soviet-era diplomacy, with its trapdoor disappearance of agents and Harry Palmer atmospherics, in some measure excited Kissinger. (“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”, he is reputed to have said.) On 20 August 1961 – a black day for Washington hawks – East German police began to seal the Berlin border and put up demarcation wire prior to installing the concrete wall. Thousands in the Soviet zone tried to flee through loopholes. Kissinger, as a part-time presidential adviser to Kennedy, warned of a deep crisis in world affairs; he was right. A year later, in October 1962, distrust between the superpowers reached new levels when Washington discovered Soviet missile sites in Fidel’s Cuba. Overnight it seemed the world was on the brink of nuclear conflagration but, mercifully, a “hot war” was averted as both the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy acknowledged the importance of saving lives and the feared hard rain never fell.
The book ends in 1968 just after Nixon has appointed the 45-year-old Kissinger as his national security adviser. The bombings of neutral Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, which Kissinger endorsed with Nixon’s backing, were “Nixinger” war crimes by any definition, killing hundreds of thousands and (it has been argued) ushering in political misery and mayhem under Pol Pot. It will be interesting to see if Ferguson seeks to justify them in his next volume. “Kissinger was never a Machiavellian”, he insists, yet, one way or another, Kissinger has a lot to answer for.
Disappointingly, we learn little of Kissinger’s emotional life or likely sexual infidelities during his first marriage and after. The biography is free of crass, anti-Soviet nostrums, but cliches cling like grime to the prose (“hotly debated”, “corridors of power”, “stiff resistance”). Ferguson has had access to Kissinger’s vast archive at the Library of Congress, yet the files seem to have got the better of him, as great chunks of quotation are allowed to lie inert and ill-edited on the page. The author proclaims himself “Kissinger’s Boswell”, but the difference between Boswell and Ferguson is that Boswell was a genius. Let us hope for greater things in volume two.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage.
Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist is published by Allen Lane (£35). Click here to buy it for £28
