by Greg Grandin
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For Eleanor and Manu, again
There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.
—Henry Kissinger, 1963
PRELUDE
On Not Seeing the Monster
Thomas Schelling, a Harvard economist and future Nobel Laureate, once asked Henry Kissinger what was more terrifying: seeing the monster or not seeing the monster?
It was early May 1970, just a few days after Richard Nixon appeared on TV and told the nation that the United States had sent ground troops into Cambodia. Nixon said that the operation was necessary to clear out enemy sanctuaries along the border with Vietnam. But his speech also made clear that something much more profound than military strategy had led to his decision to send ground troops into a neutral country. “We live in an age of anarchy,” the president said. “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years.” Nixon suggested that he had invaded Cambodia not just in response to a foreign threat but to domestic disorder: “It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight.” For months, Nixon and Kissinger, his national security adviser, had said they had a plan to get the United States out of Vietnam. Now, suddenly, they were widening the war into a neighboring country. Four days after Nixon’s speech, National Guardsmen opened fire at Kent State, killing four students who were protesting the invasion. Nine more were wounded. Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a group of protesting African American students, killing two and wounding twelve.
Schelling bore some intellectual responsibility for America’s involvement in Vietnam. He had a mind like a computer, which he used to apply mathematical formulas to military strategy. Whether one was “deterring the Russians” or “deterring one’s own children,” he said, the problem was the same: to figure out the proper ratio of threat to incentive. Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, directly applied Schelling’s theories, bombing North Vietnam as a form of behavior modification. Schelling also had a large influence on the men who would take over America’s Vietnam policy from Johnson and McNamara, particularly on Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had taught at Harvard before he joined the Nixon White House and he considered Schelling a friend. He had adopted the economist’s insights, especially the idea that “bargaining power … comes from the capacity to hurt,” to cause “sheer pain and damage.” It was a sentiment that Kissinger would try to operationalize in Southeast Asia.1
By 1970, though, Schelling had turned against the war, and the US invasion of Cambodia prompted him, along with eleven other prominent Harvard professors, to travel to Washington to meet with Kissinger and register their objections.2 This was no ordinary group of antiwar intellectuals. Over the years, different labels have been applied to the kind of men who moved easily between Washington and Cambridge, between the classroom and the war room: the Eastern establishment, the best and the brightest, the power elite. These were them. The Harvard delegation included two Nobel laureates, a future Nobel laureate (Schelling), physicists, chemists, economists, and political scientists. Many of them were former advisers to presidents going back to Harry Truman. A number of the group had been involved in executing policies that led to early American involvement in Vietnam.
Serious men, they took their break with the administration seriously. “This is too much,” one told a reporter, referring to the invasion. Others were disturbed about the coarsening of public discourse brought on by the war. “‘Professors’ and ‘liberals’—same thing,” was how Nixon’s undersecretary of defense, David Packard, dismissed the delegation. One member, Ernest May, a Harvard dean and military historian with close ties to the Pentagon, told Kissinger: “You’re tearing the country apart domestically.”
Kissinger’s former colleagues weren’t aware that Nixon and Kissinger had already been secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos for over a year (and would continue to bomb for three more before Congress put an end to it). They knew only about the invasion, and that was bad enough. “Sickening,” Schelling said. Today in the United States, a shared and largely unquestioned assumption, irrespective of political affiliation, holds that Washington has the right to use military force against the “safe havens” of terrorists or potential terrorists, even if those havens are found in sovereign countries we are not at war with. This assumption was the premise of George W. Bush’s 2002 invasion of Afghanistan and Barack Obama’s expansion of drone attacks in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, along with his most recent military operations against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. This reasoning was not widely held in 1970. Schelling’s Harvard delegation rejected Kissinger’s attempt to justify the invasion by citing the need to destroy communist “sanctuaries.” As one reporter summed up the group’s objections, violation of a neutral country’s sovereignty “could be used by anyone else in the world as a precedent for invading another country, in order, for example, to clear out terrorists.” Even if the invasion succeeded on its own terms and cleared out enemy sanctuaries, Schelling later told a journalist, “it still wouldn’t have been worth the invasion of another country.”
The meeting with Kissinger took place in the old Situation Room in the White House basement. Schelling began by introducing the group and stating its purpose, but Kissinger interrupted him: “I know who you are … you’re all good friends from Harvard University.” “No,” said Schelling, “we’re a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy and we have come to tell you so. We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisers.” Kissinger, Schelling recalled later, “went gray in the face, he slumped in his chair. I thought at the time that he suffered serious depression.” At one point, Kissinger asked if someone could tell him what “mistakes” the administration had made. It was then that Schelling asked Kissinger the question about monsters: “You look out the window, and you see a monster. And you turn to the guy standing next to you at the very same window, and say, ‘Look, there’s a monster.’ He then looks out the window and doesn’t see a monster at all. How do you explain to him that there really is a monster?”
Schelling continued: “As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand.”
“We just don’t know which one is scarier,” Schelling said.
INTRODUCTION
An Obituary Foretold
Henry Kissinger has been accused of many bad things. And when he dies, his critics will get a chance to rehearse the charges. Christopher Hitchens, who made the case that the former secretary of state should be tried as a war criminal, is himself gone. But there’s a long witness-for-the-prosecution list—reporters, historians, and lawyers eager to prov
ide background on any of Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places.
There have been scores of books published on the man over the years, but it is still Seymour Hersh’s 1983 The Price of Power that future biographers will have to top. Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the B-52s. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage with epic consequences.
Denunciations will be balanced by more favorable views. Kissinger has many devotees. And once his detractors and admirers are dispensed with, the obituary will move on to those who urge balance. Transgressions, they’ll say, need to be weighed against accomplishments: détente with the Soviet Union, opening up Communist China, negotiating arms treaties with Moscow, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s at this moment that the consequences of many of Kissinger’s policies will be redefined as “controversies” and consigned to matters of opinion, or perspective, rather than fact. On the heels of George W. Bush’s reckless hubris and Barack Obama’s reactive pragmatism, Kissinger’s sober statesmanship is, as a number of commentators have recently claimed, needed more than ever.
There’ll be color commentary, colleagues and acquaintances who will reminisce that he had a wry sense of humor and a fondness for intrigue, good food, and high-cheeked women. We’ll be reminded that he dated Jill St. John and Marlo Thomas, was friends with Shirley MacLaine, and was affectionately known as Super K, Henry of Arabia, and the Playboy of the West Wing. Kissinger was brilliant and had a temper. He was vulnerable, which made him vicious, and his relationship with Richard Nixon was, as one reporter put it, “deeply weird.” They were the original frenemies, with Kissinger flattering Nixon to his face and bitching about him behind his back. “The meatball mind,” he called his boss as soon as the phone was back on the hook, a “drunk.”1 Nixonger, Isaiah Berlin called the duo.
Born in Fürth, Germany, in 1923, Kissinger came to America when he was fifteen, and summaries of his life will stress his foreignness. “Jewboy,” Nixon called him. Kissinger’s view of the world, conventionally described as valuing stability and the advance of national interests above abstract ideals like democracy and human rights, is often said to clash with America’s sense of itself as innately good, as an exceptional and indispensable nation. “Intellectually,” his biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes, his “mind would retain its European cast.” Kissinger, notes another writer, had a worldview that a “born American could not have.” And his Bavarian accent did grow deeper as he grew older.2
But reading Kissinger as alien, as out of tune with the chords of American exceptionalism, misses the point of the man. He was in fact the quintessential American, his cast of mind perfectly molded to his place and time.
* * *
As a young man, Kissinger embraced the most American of conceits: self-creation, the notion that one’s fate is not determined by one’s condition, that the weight of history might impose limits to freedom, but within those limits there is considerable room to maneuver. Kissinger didn’t express these ideas in an American vernacular, the way, say New World poets and writers like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville did. “The Past is dead, and has no resurrection,” Melville wrote, “but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation.… Those who are solely governed by the Past stand, like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward.… It is for America to make precedents, and not to obey them.” Rather, Kissinger tended to express his philosophy in the heavy prose of German metaphysics. But the ideas were largely the same: “Necessity,” he wrote in 1950, “describes the past but freedom rules the future.”3
That line is from a thesis that Kissinger submitted as a Harvard senior, a nearly four-hundred-page journey through the writings of a number of European philosophers.4 “The Meaning of History,” as Kissinger titled the work, is dense, melancholy, and often overwrought, easy to dismiss as the product of youth. But Kissinger has repeated many of its premises and arguments, in different forms, to this day. Besides, by the time of his arrival at Harvard, the author had extensive real-world, wartime experience thinking about the questions his thesis raised, including the relationship between information and wisdom, being and nothingness, and the way the past presses on the present.
Kissinger escaped the Holocaust. But at least twelve family members didn’t. Drafted into the army in 1943, he spent the last year of the war back in Germany, working his way up the ranks of military intelligence. As administrator of the occupied Rhine River town of Krefeld, with a population of 200,000, Kissinger purged Nazis from municipal posts. He also distinguished himself as an intelligence agent, identifying, arresting, and interrogating Gestapo officers and securing confidential informants. He won a Bronze Star for his effectiveness and bravery. In other words, the tension between fact and truth, a central preoccupation of his thesis—which, as one observer points out, reads like a “personal statement”—was not an abstract question for Kissinger. It was the stuff of life and death, and Kissinger’s subsequent diplomacy was, writes one of Kissinger’s Harvard classmates, a “virtual transplant from the world of thought into the world of power.”5
Kissinger’s metaphysics, as they evolved from his thesis to his most recent book, published at the age of ninety-one, comprised equal parts gloom and glee. The gloom was reflected in his acceptance that experience, life itself, is ultimately meaningless and that history is tragic. “Life is suffering, birth involves death,” he wrote in 1950, “transitoriness is the fate of existence.… Experience is always unique and solitary.”6 As to “history,” he said he believed in its “tragic element.” “The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps,” he wrote, “cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.” The glee came from embracing that meaninglessness, from the realization that one’s actions were neither predetermined by historical inevitability nor governed by a higher moral authority. There were “limits” to what an individual could do, “necessities,” as Kissinger put it, imposed by the fact that we live in a world filled with other beings. But individuals possess will, instinct, and intuition—qualities that can be used to expand their arena of freedom.7
It’s difficult to work one’s way through Kissinger’s brooding thesis. But it is worth the effort, for it reveals him as a far more interesting thinker than he is conventionally described as being. Kissinger is inevitably called a “realist,” which is true if realism is defined as holding a pessimistic view of human nature and a belief that power is needed to impose order on anarchic social relations. But if realism is taken as a view of the world that holds that reality is transparent, that the “truth” of facts can be arrived at from simply observing those facts, then Kissinger was decidedly not a realist. Rather, Kissinger in his thesis was declaring himself in favor of what today the Right denounces as radical relativism: there is no such thing as absolute truth, he argued, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective. “Meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context,” he wrote. “Every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.” Truth, Kissinger said, isn’t found in facts but in the questions we ask of those facts. History’s meaning is “inherent in the nature of our query.”8
This kind of subjectivism was in the postwar air, and Kissinger in his thesis sounds not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influential lecture on existentialism was published in English in 1947 and is cited in Kissinger’s bibliography. Sartre, like Kissinger, would soon use the phrase “dialectical unity of freedom and necessity.” And when Kissinger insists that individuals have the “choice” to act with “responsibility” toward others, he seems absolutely Sartrean: since morality isn’t something that is imposed from w
ithout but comes from within, each individual “is responsible for the world.” Kissinger, though, would take a very different path than Sartre and other dissenting intellectuals, and this is what made his existentialism exceptional: he used it not to protest war but to justify waging it.
Kissinger wasn’t alone among postwar policy intellectuals in invoking the “tragedy” of human existence and the belief that life is suffering, that the best one can hope for is to establish a world of order and rules. George Kennan, a conservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal, both thought human nature’s “dark and tangled aspects,” as Schlesinger put it, justified a strong military.9 The world needed policing. But both men (and many others who shared their tragic sensibility, like Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau) eventually became critical, some extremely so, of American power. By 1957, Kennan was arguing for “disengagement” from the Cold War and by 1982 he was describing the Reagan administration as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant.”10 Vietnam provoked Schlesinger to advocate stronger legislative power to rein in what he came to call the “imperial presidency.”
Not Kissinger. At every single one of America’s postwar turning points, moments of crisis when men of good will began to express doubts about American power, Kissinger broke in the opposite direction. He made his peace with Nixon, whom he first thought was unhinged; then with Ronald Reagan, whom he initially considered hollow; and then with George W. Bush’s neocons, despite the fact that they all rose to power attacking Kissinger. Fortified by his uncommon mix of gloom and glee, Kissinger never wavered. The gloom led him, as a conservative, to privilege order over justice. The glee led him to think he might, by the force of his will and intellect, forestall the tragic and claim, if only for a fleeting moment, freedom. “Those statesmen who have achieved final greatness did not do so through resignation, however well founded,” Kissinger wrote in his 1954 doctoral dissertation. “It was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.”11
