Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist Hardcover – September 29, 2015

“For this reason, I can predict with certainty that hostile reviewers will allege that I have in some way been influenced or induced to paint a falsely flattering picture.’’So true.“My sole commitment was to make my “best efforts to record [his] life ‘as it actually was’ on the basis of an informed study of the documentary and other evidence available.”“This commitment was part of a legal agreement, which ended with the following clause . . .“While the authority of the Work will be enhanced by the extent of the Grantor’s [i.e., Kissinger’s] assistance . . . it will be enhanced still more by the fact of the Author’s independence; thus, it is understood and agreed that . . . the Author shall have full editorial control over the final manuscript of the Work, and the Grantor shall have no right to vet, edit, amend or prevent the publication of the finished manuscript of the Work.’’And (I think) Ferguson reached that goal. No biographer can deeply see into a life and be blinded by hostile prejudice; on the other-hand, preconceived assumptions can warp his vision. The right balance requires genuine skill.Most of this extensive work (864 pages) is historical narrative. Ferguson is writing, in reality, two biographies. One, biography of a famous public intellectual; and two, the biography of twentieth century politics. In fact, seems to spend more pages on cultural, political, academic, military context — than Kissinger’s story.Great! (If you want that much detail)Students of political science, scholars looking for comprehensive references, curious readers looking for ‘inside story’, etc., etc., will all be satisfied. For general reader wanting overview . . .Nevertheless, Ferguson includes analysis, opinion, conclusions and insights. For example, in epilogue . . .“It was an education in five stages . . .The first was Kissinger’s youthful experience of German tyranny, American democracy, and world war.The second was his discovery of philosophical idealism and then historical knowledge at Harvard, and his first application in “Boswash” of these academic insights in the new field of nuclear strategy.The third stage was the harsh lesson in political reality he received in Washington, D.C., during the giddy, risky years of the Kennedy administration.Then came the exposure, from the ground up, to the new kind of warfare that was being waged in Vietnam.Finally, in Paris, Kissinger learned what it was to be diplomatically hoodwinked.’’This provides outstanding summary. Then . . .“At all but the last stage of his educational progress, there was a mentor: first, Fritz Kraemer, the monocled Mephistopheles in olive-green fatigues; then William Elliott, Dixie’s Oxonian idealist; then McGeorge Bundy, the WASP in the White House; then Nelson Rockefeller, a would-be Medici to Kissinger’s anti-Machiavelli, as naïve in his pursuit of power as Kissinger was idealistic in his counsel.’’As shown above, Ferguson’s deft sketch of many famous people adds color and interest. Many, many more — Kennedys, Johnson, Haig, Adenauer, MacGeorge Bundy, de Gaulle, Dulles, Rostow, Eisenhower, W. Y. Elliott, Ho Chi Minh, Kennan, Khrushchev, H. C. Lodge, McNamara, Nixon, etc., etc., — these are just the ones with numerous references!Some real . . . real . . . revelations . . .CHAPTER 1 HeimatCHAPTER 2 EscapeCHAPTER 3 Fürth on the HudsonCHAPTER 4 An Unexpected PrivateCHAPTER 5 The Living and the DeadCHAPTER 6 In the Ruins of the ReichCHAPTER 7 The IdealistCHAPTER 8 Psychological WarfareCHAPTER 9 Doctor KissingerCHAPTER 10 Strangelove?CHAPTER 11 BoswashCHAPTER 12 The Intellectual and the Policy MakerCHAPTER 13 Flexible ResponsesCHAPTER 14 Facts of LifeCHAPTER 15 CrisisCHAPTER 16 The Road to VietnamCHAPTER 17 The Unquiet AmericanCHAPTER 18 Dirt Against the WindCHAPTER 19 The Anti-BismarckCHAPTER 20 Waiting for HanoiCHAPTER 21 1968CHAPTER 22 The Unlikely CombinationEPILOGUE: A BildungsromanWhat surprised (astounded) me the most was Kissinger’s doctoral thesis . . .“The Meaning of History” has gone down in history—as the longest-ever thesis written by a Harvard senior and the origin of the current limit on length (35,000 words, or around 140 pages, still known to some as “the Kissinger rule”). The thesis was 388 pages long—and this was after chapters on Hegel and Schweitzer had been cut. But its size was not the most remarkable thing about it.’’Really?“In a dazzling distillation of three years’ worth of reading, Kissinger gives us not just Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant but also Collingwood, Dante, Darwin, Descartes, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Hegel, Hobbes, Holmes, Homer, Hume, Locke, Milton, Plato, Sartre, Schweitzer, Spinoza, Tolstoy, Vico, Virgil, and Whitehead—as well as Bradley, Huntington, Joseph, Poincaré, Reichenbach, Royce, Russell, Sheffer, Stebbing, and Veblen in the appendix on the logic of meaning.’’Wow! Professional philosophers would be proud to complete this . . . this . . . overwhelming dive into the depths . . . For a political science student? What does Kissinger conclude?“The experience of freedom in a determined environment is [thus] seen to be potentially meaningful after all. . . . Purposiveness is not revealed by phenomenal reality but constitutes the resolve of a soul. Freedom does have a place in a determined universe.”This decision against determinism and for freedom is rare. How did he defend this?“Where does Kissinger himself stand in the end? The answer is with freedom over necessity, with choice understood as an inward experience . . .“Freedom,” he writes in a key passage, “is not a definitional quality, but an inner experience of life as a process of deciding meaningful alternatives. This . . . does not mean unlimited choice. Everybody is a product of an age, a nation, and environment. But, beyond that, he constitutes what is essentially unapproachable by analysis . . . the creative essence of history, the moral personality. However we may explain actions in retrospect, their accomplishment occurred with the inner conviction of choice. . . . Man can find the sanction for his actions only within himself.’’Well . . . no one can claim Kissinger was superficial . . .A lot of stuff in Ferguson’s book. Reader can skip a lot (I did) and still find much to absorb.Sixty seven photographsExtensive index (linked)Thousands of notes (linked)Five hundred sources (not linked)Tremendous research!

When thinking about Henry Kissinger, many people harbor the same opinions of him that are usually reserved for Richard Nixon, the U.S. President he served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Often he has been called a Machiavellian manipulator eager to climb the greasy pole of political power. Yet Niall Ferguson, as he has done in his previous works Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, makes an excellent counterfactual argument, asserting that Kissinger is actually a Kantian idealist. This is different than the Wilsonian idealists Americans might be more familiar with, who assert that foreign policy goals should only be pursued when our moral principles align with legal and military positions. Instead, the Kantian idealist, according to Kissinger and Ferguson, deals with problems as they arise, willingly running risks for a less than perfect outcome, because waiting for ideal conditions could lead to a moral problem worse than choosing to do the wrong thing: choosing to do nothing at all (p. 870). With that in mind, Ferguson slowly builds his case for seeing Kissinger in this light and, I believe, is fully vindicated by the time the reader reads the last pages of the epilogue. Mr. Ferguson also does an excellent job of analyzing Kissinger's work on foreign policy in both the academic and political realms, with a keen eye to Kissinger's strengths and weaknesses. It's exhaustive and almost never boring. The only drawbacks to this book are how much of the book is spent NOT describing Kissinger's life, but rather the historical events surrounding Kissinger. This is particularly true with Kissinger's early life, which covers the first couple of chapters, and while it can feel a little excessive at times, Ferguson's detours are always vindicated once he ties them back into Kissinger's life. The other drawback is that Mr. Ferguson seems to think that Kissinger's personal life barely affected his work. For example, Mr. Ferguson spends barely a page describing the breakdown of Kissinger's first marriage. It seems obvious that Kissinger was suffering physically as well as emotionally, which could only have been exacerbated by his constant shuttling between Boston, Washington, and foreign countries. In fact, there are no signs in Mr. Ferguson's narrative that their marriage is in serious jeopardy until it is over. While I am not asking for all the nitty gritty details of Mr. Kissinger's life, this disconnect between Kissinger's private life and public work does seem strange to me. In spite of these shortcomings, this is a great biography that delves deeply into the strategic foreign policy questions Kissinger wrestled with throughout this period and Mr. Ferguson's excellent analysis is a master class in analyzing U.S. global strategy during the Cold War. Yet this is only half the story as by the end of it Kissinger has not yet come into power as Nixon's National Security Advisor. Whether or not Mr. Kissinger will be able to maintain his Kantian ideals once in power is a question Mr. Ferguson leaves dangling in the air. Thus, I eagerly await the answer in Mr. Ferguson's second volume in this duology.

I purchased this book as an audio book, and I listen to it during my morning hikes and exercise workouts. I am more of a history-buff than a fan of biographies, but biographies teach us much about history from a particular individual's point of view. The audio books runs for 35 hours!I have always admired H Kissinger and the author, Niall Ferguson. Listening to this wonderful audiobook has given me greater insights into the personalities and events that surrounded the life of the younger Kissinger and foreign policy and politics of the end of WW II until the 1970's.I am a Vietnam era veteran of the USAF, and I went to defcon3 or defcon2 (I can't remember exactly) during the 1973 Arab Israeli war. We were mobilized at 2AM in the morning under full alert conditions, and when I arrived on the flightline nearly all our F111s and SAC B-52 bombers were gone off toward Europe and the Middle East. We had Israeli El-AL jets and cargo planes landing on our base to pick up supplies. I helped load-up some cargo destined for Israel.One item I have not heard mentioned by Kissinger in his biography is that it is the USA and Western powers that violated the vote of the Vietnamese people, who actually voted in a communist government. Personally, I don’t care: Communism is so evil and anti-Christian, that it should be opposed wherever it pops up.In retrospect, I used to be on the fence regarding the Vietnam war. In my view, the war was worth it as it held back communism long enough in Asia to give other countries like Thailand and Singapore the chance to establish better forms of Government.I look forward to volume 2!