Abstract
Thomas Schwartz’s study of Henry Kissinger is neither the first nor the last word on its controversial subject. Kissinger was the object of biographical praise and derision even in office and continues to be the most revered and reviled Secretary of State in recent American history, almost forty-five years after leaving office. Even during his tenure at the State Department, he was the subject of a long and admiring biography by Bernard and Marvin Kalb, and after leaving office, penned three massive volumes of memoirs that repay reading, even if they must be used with care. In retirement, he was visited by foreign policy neophytes, such as Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and even the egregious Donald Trump, eager to appear to imbibe geopolitical wisdom from the sage of Park Avenue. Yet there have been fervid critics too. The 1983 volume by Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, presented Kissinger as a monster of ambition, while the lively 2001 polemic by Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, depicted him as nothing less than a war criminal and called for him to be hauled before the international jurists at The Hague. More recently, in 2015, Niall Ferguson published the first installment of an authorized biography, with access to Kissinger’s personal papers, that takes roughly a thousand pages to take its subject up to the age of forty-five, before he becomes Richard Nixon’s national security advisor.
Schwartz begins by noting that “the extreme praise and vilification Kissinger receives does little to provide any real understanding of the historical role he has played” and says his goal is “to reintroduce Henry Kissinger to the American people and to an international audience” (5). The tone throughout is determinedly measured, and, on the whole, Schwartz serves his readers well. He does not claim to write a comprehensive biography and, though he interviewed Kissinger, did not have the access to his papers that Ferguson enjoyed, and this occasionally shows. The first sixty-four pages cover Kissinger’s first forty-five years and manage to raise as many questions as they answer. In particular, Schwartz has little to add to the view articulated by previous biographers that the young Kissinger’s experience as a refugee from the Holocaust and an Army sergeant in postwar Germany imbued him with an acute awareness of the human condition’s tragic dimension and inoculated him against much faith in the benevolence of his fellow man. This bleak worldview found expression in his undergraduate thesis at Harvard, focused on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant, and his first book, which discussed the world-weary statecraft of Metternich and Castlereagh at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Yet Schwartz does demonstrate that from fairly early on in his academic career, Kissinger had an eye for position and influence. His 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was both intellectually audacious and politic. His criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear strategy of massive retaliation chimed with the popular mood, and “(t)hat Kissinger’s own solution of nuclear war was also highly problematic was less important to many contemporary observers than that it broke free from the straitjacket of the Eisenhower administration’s policy” (42). It also helped him consolidate a relationship with his first influential patron, New York governor and presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund helped support Kissinger’s research projects, and the ambitious professor wrote speeches for the governor. But in 1968, Rockefeller was a hesitant and late entrant in the Republican presidential primaries, and he lost the nomination to Richard Nixon, who Kissinger barely knew and did not much like.
Yet it turned out that Nixon, for reasons of a conflict-averse temperament and a penchant for secrecy, and Kissinger, out of conviction, had in common a desire to run foreign policy out of the White House, as both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had also wanted, and to bypass a State Department neither really trusted. As a result, Kissinger became Nixon’s National Security Adviser and embarked on an ambitious course of secret diplomacy with North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China. This unlikely pair shared an analysis of the US as dangerously overextended, mired in a seemingly unwinnable war in Vietnam, and threatened by the spectre of looming parity with the Soviet Union in strategic nuclear arms. The core of their shared policy of retrenchment was “triangular diplomacy,” where the US would seek détente with Moscow and an opening to the previously isolated Beijing, striving to ensure that the two Communist powers were never as close to each other as the US was to both, and to play them off against each other. The implementation of the shift in Cold War strategy required secret visits by Kissinger to the Communist capitals, and some schadenfreude at the frequent public humiliation of Secretary of State William P. Rogers, whom Nixon had selected because he had little background in foreign policy and was likely to be a weak secretary.
The bulk of the book consists of accounts of the various files in which Kissinger was involved, from détente with Moscow and strategic arms limitation talks, to peacemaking between Arabs and Israelis that saw Moscow excluded from influence in the region, to the endless negotiations to wind down the Vietnam conflict. The sheer range of issues with which Kissinger dealt and the modest size of the book preclude definitive treatment of any one of them, but as a judicious overview of Kissinger’s stewardship of US foreign policy, Schwartz’s account is unlikely to be bettered any time soon. He praises Kissinger’s real achievements while criticizing his relative indifference to human rights and willingness to work with repressive regimes, regardless of their ideological complexion. He also points out that, while triangular diplomacy may have heralded a major break in US Cold War strategy, it produced at best mixed results in its principal short-term objective, that of inducing Moscow and Beijing to exert pressure on Hanoi to reach a peace settlement, or at least lessen their support. That said, Kissinger obtained a peace that gave the Saigon regime a breathing space and was arguably better than facts on the ground allowed, even if he mislead Saigon about the help it could expect in the inevitable event of renewed hostilities.
The subtitle, “a political biography,” points to one of the book’s strengths. While many previous scholars of Kissinger’s record, admirers and detractors alike, have tended to take Kissinger at his word that largely formulated and executed foreign policy with little regard to domestic political considerations, Schwartz demonstrates that he was acutely sensitive to how various initiatives would “play” with Congress, the news media, and the American public, and to press his interpretations of how policies would be received on his deeply neurotic chief. Kissinger, like every secretary of state, had a constituency of one, and he was assiduous in cultivating it. Schwartz effectively mines the materials in Nixon’s presidential library and other archival sources to chronicle the ups and downs of the Nixon–Kissinger relationship in more detail than we have seen before. The result is riveting, if generally unlovely reading, and confirms Kissinger as a master of the arts of the courtier.
Schwartz also makes good use of Vanderbilt University’s archive of television news broadcasts to cover Kissinger’s generally efficacious wooing of the media, despite the disdain in which most reporters held Nixon and his administration. Some readers may be surprised that he adds little to the image of Kissinger as a “swinger” and ladies’ man, but his reputation in that arena is probably exaggerated. The arc of the Nixon–Kissinger relationship is not without its ironies. Nixon and his domestic aides were jealous of Kissinger’s favourable press, but in 1973 the beleaguered Nixon sought to distract attention from the Watergate scandal by promoting Kissinger to Secretary of State and focusing on the administration’s foreign policy successes. After Nixon’s departure, his successor, Gerald Ford, was effectively criticized in the 1976 presidential election for having contracted leadership in foreign policy out to the “lone ranger” Kissinger, and for the amorality of détente.
While future studies of aspects of Kissinger’s career will come, and are indeed welcome, Schwartz has provided a handy compendium of what we know about the record, with helpful insights of his own. The result will be welcomed by readers encountering Kissinger for the first time as well as students of the period.