"A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory." —Christopher Hitchens
Great historical figures make interesting enemies. Henry Kissinger, who turned 100 on May 27, has collected quite an assortment. He is the most consequential foreign policymaker in U.S. history, whose reputation mirrors America’s record abroad. The record is, shall we say, checkered.
To paint with a broad brush: Kissinger was better when it came to great power brinksmanship and awful when it came to places and people he judged of less consequence. That is the epitaph.
What are we to make of Kissinger’s Century? For his many critics, it adds up to an indictment of American power, which Kissinger deployed regardless of the legalities. His defenders, lately a muted constituency, suggest that by engaging China and the Soviet Union, Kissinger cleaved the West’s rivals and allowed it to win the Cold War. These perspectives share a tendency to heap credit or blame for momentous events on a single German Jewish refugee, who rose from obscurity to the heights of power. Kissinger-obsession is an odd form of celebrity worship.
CultureWag is for curious smarties from Hollywood to Helsinki. Become a member of our Super Duper V.I.P. Club today.
Subscribed
It does keep Kissinger, Zelig-like, in history’s main frame. (No modern person wastes time excoriating Dean Rusk.) He left government service more than four decades ago, yet his influence persists. The nightmare episodes of his run as national security advisor and secretary of state—in Indochina, Bangladesh, East Timor and Latin America — happened long before many of his vehement detractors were born. Yet even Kissinger concedes America’s current crisis of polarization has its roots in the Vietnam era. This does make him an author of our current predicaments. For a funny little man, he casts a long shadow.
Naturally, his centenary was a mixed bag. What do you expect from the toast of the Harvard Club and the bête noire of the Mother Jones? Commemorations requiring Kissinger’s participation leaned into Great Man hagiography, but overall, the coverage was circumspect to withering. Somehow, Kissinger is more controversial at 100 than he was at the height of his worldly powers. Say what you will, it makes him interesting.
People have been accusing Kissinger of war crimes since 1969. These people are mostly not invited to the black tie galas he still attends, but increasingly, they lob inconvenient questions on the red carpet. The image of Kissinger as a Machiavellian conniver percolated up from the peace movement, into the academy and media — nooks where he once felt at home. To be fair, isolationist righties hate him too.
If there is a Javert leading this prosecution, it is the late Christopher Hitchens, who manages to shoot barbs from beyond the grave. Hitchens wrote The Trial of Henry Kissinger back in 2001, when his target was pushing 80. “Old enough to know better,” the writer quipped. It is a brilliant work of journalistic assassination.
Timing helped. Kissinger’s instrument in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, had recently been indicted for human rights crimes (he died in 2006 without being convicted) and Kissinger had recused himself from the 9/11 inquiry so as not to reveal a list of deep-pocketed foreign clients. Not a good look. The Hitchens case — that Kissinger prolonged Vietnam, abetted nasty little murders and enabled grotesque genocides all over the world, at exorbitant cost and for no appreciable benefit — is now in cement. It’s not the only take on Kissinger, but it remains the most viral.
As a polemicist, Hitchens was both fearless and wildly entertaining. Many other books have been written about Heinz Alfred Kissinger —pro, con, and assiduously neutral. Kissinger has written many books himself, and continues to do so at an astounding rate. These narratives pale beside a horror story starring a malignant reptile —as anybody who Googles Kissinger and War Criminal will discover.
The conservative historian Niall Ferguson, Kissinger’s official biographer, has launched a counter offensive, which portrays Kissinger as an idealist and patriot, who, after a series of lucky breaks, wound up guiding the ship of state at a precarious time. He has not yet published his work covering the meat of Kissinger’s career, from 1968 to 1974, for which he is most colorfully reviled. “Perhaps I should subtitle it Dr. Evil,” Ferguson quipped in 2015.
Kissinger, who has written and said so much that can be construed as chilling (he does have a super villain’s sense of humor), has never acknowledged the Hitchens book, “though I know I needle him,” the writer said back when it was published. But Kissinger needles, too. He enrages critics because, like Old Scratch, he endures.
All of Kissinger’s Nixon-era cronies have shuffled off their mortal coils. Hitchens and other old foes drop like flies. Kissinger sticks around, as sharp as any centenarian could be, prosperous and unrepentant. At 98, he cranked out a book about artificial intelligence with billionaire Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. If you’re looking for late-breaking regret about Cambodia, shop elsewhere.
The year 2023 is a late date for chickens to roost. In all the years since U.S. forces left Southeast Asia, Cambodia has rarely troubled the flighty American consciousness. Thanks to a media ecosystem that would have vexed the sneaky types in the Nixon administration, it is finding new ways of breaking through. “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands,” wrote Anthony Bourdain, another fallen foe. He said this more than two decades after the last bomb dropped.
Because massive U.S. military action is directly related to Cambodia’s many miseries, it seems to stick to Kissinger in ways that, for example, the deaths hundreds of thousands in the Bangladesh liberation war does not. (Kissinger conceded “misjudgment” in that case, but justified support for Pakistan in the conflict because its regime was America’s only conduit to China).
The centenary inevitably returned us to Phnom Penh. The Intercept, another enemy of Kissinger’s ruthless approach to statecraft, published a grim accounting of Operation Menu, the covert carpet bombing campaign which unloaded more ordinance on Cambodia than all the munitions dropped on Japan during World War II. This apocalypse was justified as a show of American credibility in a conflict that Kissinger saw as a lost cause from his first visit to Indochina in 1965.
The matter was gently raised by Kissinger’s friend, Ted Koppel, in a CBS This Morning birthday interview. “Come on, we have been bombing with drones and all of kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” said Kissinger. “It's been the same in every administration of either party.” When his 83-year-old interviewer pressed, Kissinger bristled. “This is a program you’re doing because I’m going to be 100 years old. And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”
Koppel defended the interview by Isaac Chotiner in the New Yorker. “I’ve been covering the man for fifty years, and I find him a particularly interesting diplomat, statesman, a man who has shaped the foreign policy of this country in ways many of which were positive,” he told Chotiner. “ I don’t think either of us has a purely one dimensional view of Henry Kissinger. But you seem to be more fixated on the … [long pause] negative.”
The negative chases Kissinger but never quite catches up. Of all the remarkable places he’s traveled, the dock in the Hague is not on the itinerary. He knows too many important people—and far too much—for that to be a meaningful threat. In his younger days (though hardly his youth), Kissinger assiduously courted the media class, and they have never entirely abandoned him. He did not invent the saying “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Napoleon, about whom he knows a few things, likely came up with that, but it is forever associated with him. Did anybody buy him as a sex symbol in the 1970s? No more than they did Woody Allen. Among his diabolical super powers is a knack for self-promotion.
What Kissinger lucratively sells, to the chagrin of moralists, is his perspective. Since the 1960s, has had access to the most powerful people in the world. His counsel is rooted in study of European history (for all the Harvard professor’s misadventures in the developing world, he is an Atlanticist), He dismisses of the emotionalism of any moment in favor of cool maintenance of the national interest and world order. This could not be more unfashionable. It is often wrong. But those who wish to work the levers of power tend to kiss the ring.
Hitchens would say this is a con, but Kissinger has never lacked for would-be Alexanders to tutor. Kissinger did not care for Nixon at first — the Rockefeller Republican called him dangerous — but as Nixon’s fortunes rose they became joined at the hip. The stories about Kissinger sabotaging the 1968 Paris peace talks to benefit Nixon’s campaign haven’t prevented powerful Democrats from seeking his counsel.
Among the guests at Kissinger’s June 5 birthday soirée at the New York Public Library was USAID director Samantha Power, who decried Kissinger’s role in genocides in her Pulitzer-winning book A Problem from Hell. She is also a recipient of the Kissinger Prize for contributions to transatlantic relations. Also on hand was Secretary of State State Antony Blinken, who interviewed Kissinger for his Harvard senior thesis on the trans-Siberian pipeline. New York magazine found attendees reluctant to sing the praises of the man of the hour, but they showed up just the same.
Hillary Clinton, who did not go attend, has called Kissinger a friend and mentor (and was attacked by her 2016 Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders for doing so). Joe Biden has known Kissinger since he was a senator, but thus far he is the only U.S. president not to have invited him to the White House.
This has been covered as something of a snub, a sign that Kissinger’s fortunes have shifted at last. But he transcends mere administrations. Kissinger has been expansive on the topic of Ukraine, where he began by pressing for territorial concessions to Russia and now favors NATO membership for the Ukrainians. This speaks to his eternal talent for reading a room.
Yet the world outside the well-appointed rooms Kissinger inhabits has grown increasingly mistrustful of the institutions he works so well. Any investigation into why that is takes you right where Kissinger says it does — to the Nixon era and those necessary steps, which also had a way of circumventing the democratic process and undermining faith in government.
Kissinger was adjacent to Nixon’s criminality, but glided away to Kalorama, Park Avenue and Davos. He has a compelling answer for every challenge to his record, which is: You weren’t there. Soviet Communism posed an existential threat to the West and Kissinger outlasted it. He is not the only policymaker who believed little wars, dirty and otherwise, were necessary for victory. This collateral damage wasn’t just in faraway countries, but to the American psyche.
We have hit one of those moments of doubt in the American story, a febrile time not unlike the one that brought Kissinger to power. In advanced age, he is a piñata for the Democratic Socialist Left and the America First Right, the embodiment of a corrupt elite that has led us over many cliffs. He unites these implacable enemies in loathing.
This loathing—not just of foreign adventurism and the liberal order but of Kissinger as its avatar—plumbs an ancient bigotry. He is disturbingly caricatured as the cosmopolitan outsider with the foreign accent, an amoral manipulator of conspiracies behind the scenes. In depictions of his power lust and avarice falls the pernicious shadow of The Eternal Jew.
This is not just the name of a notorious Nazi propaganda film, but the title of an essay Kissinger wrote as a young G.I., returned to his birth country as a member of the Allied Forces. Ferguson’s work on Kissinger may be dismissed by some critics as an apologia, but it delivers rich insights in the form of his early writing.
The essay was written after the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp, an experience that shook the young soldier to his core. After encountering the starving and the dead, he wrote: “That is humanity in the 20th Century. People reach such a stupor of suffering that life and death, animation or immobility can’t be differentiated anymore…Who was lucky, the man who draws circles in the sand and mumbles I am free, or the bones that are interred in the hillside?”
This is the man who propelled himself from a job at a shaving brush factory and night school to Harvard and from there to the White House and enormous power. Kissinger gives no quarter to soft psychoanalysis; He claims being beaten by Nazi gangs as a boy left him with no lasting trauma. His response was to become a maker of history, not another of its victims.
Why did Kissinger become the ultimate powerbroker instead of a voice for the powerless? How could a man appalled by the horrors of Ahlem, who lost loved ones to the Holocaust, dispense with Chilean democracy out of expediency and say of the Khmer Rouge: “they are murderous thugs but we won’t let that stand in our way?” He saw these as necessary steps, and he was prepared to do what was necessary. We who raise our emotions weren’t there.
He will always be a man of the material world, where brutes try to bring history to heel. Kissinger lost his old religion during the war and adopted a new one. “To me there is not only right or wrong, but many shades in between,” he wrote to his devoutly Orthodox father. “The real tragedies in life are not choices between right and wrong. Real difficulties bear difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t begin to comprehend.”
Kissinger will be consigned to that boundless gray zone, where the world turns on power and suffering, and we are never comforted by a pat answer to whether the ends justify the means. —Alden Pyle
More on Henry Kissinger:
The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World by Barry Gewen
Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson
The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson
Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography by Thomas A. Schwartz
Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger
