Henry Kissinger prepares to go on the US public affairs TV program Face the Nation in 1958.

Henry Kissinger prepares to go on the US public affairs TV program Face the Nation in 1958.Credit:Getty Images

The first volume of this authorised biography,by the prominent trans-Atlantic conservative historian,Niall Ferguson,takes us to the moment when Henry Kissinger was appointed by Richard Nixon in late 1968 as the new President's National Security Adviser,that is to say before the time he exercised any real power. At almost 900 pages it is,to put it mildly,rather long.

To be fair,much of the story Ferguson tells will be unfamiliar to almost everyone. Kissinger was the son of a middle-class Bavarian Orthodox Jewish family. In 1938,when he was a teenager,the Kissinger family went to the United States as refugees from Nazi Germany. Kissinger claims his rather uneventful childhood and early adolescence in Germany had no influence on his later thought. Nonetheless a chapter is devoted to it.

Kissinger:1923-1968:The Idealist by Niall Ferguson

Kissinger:1923-1968:The Idealist by Niall Ferguson

In his late teens Kissinger was drafted into the US Army and sent to Europe following D-Day. Before long he was recruited into military intelligence and played a minor role in the postwar de-Nazification process. Although he was involved in the liberation of an obscure concentration camp,Ahlem​,he denied that the Holocaust had played any part in his intellectual formation. More important was the man he met in 1944 who became his mentor,the fellow refugee Fritz Kraemer,a monocled 21-year-old conservative intellectual from a baptised German Jewish family.

Kissinger returned to the US in 1947. Somewhat grandiosely he wrote home:"I have known great things&I have done great things."By now,to his parents'disappointment,he had abandoned his religion. To appease them somewhat he married,apparently unhappily,a young Orthodox woman of whom his parents approved. Kissinger explained that he developed his lifelong demeanour of"aloofness"and"slight irony"as a shield against parental rejection.

Kissinger studied politics and history at Harvard. He made few friends. One claimed he had no charm. His most important distinction was the authorship of the longest undergraduate thesis in Harvard's history. After completing his doctoral thesis,on Metternich​ and the conservative restoration of Europe after the Napoleonic disruption,Kissinger was appointed as a research fellow not a professor. He was an academic success but not a star.

Already,he chafed at the limitations of the academic life. Kissinger edited a minor CIA-funded magazine,Confluence. He worked in numerous positions as a policy adviser under the patronage of the Democrat,McGeorge Bundy,and the wealthy Republican,Nelson Rockefeller.

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Kissinger was by now an extremely hard-line Cold Warrior,who thought the United States was losing the struggle against communism and the Soviet Union. After the 1957 culture shock following the Soviet sputnik launch,Kissinger became,quite suddenly,an intellectual celebrity with his book,Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Its thesis was that unless the US was willing to use tactical nuclear weapons in a limited war against the Soviet Union,his adopted country would soon be reduced to irrelevancy.

Kissinger argued that such a war could be fought with minimal civilian casualties. What is particularly shocking is that he so lacked technical understanding that he had underestimated the destructive power of tactical nuclear weapons by a factor of a hundred.

At a time when the US had overwhelming nuclear weapons superiority,Kissinger argued that a coming missile gap in the favour of the enemy would inevitably lead either to a surprise Soviet attack or a"piecemeal erosion of the free world". At the time of the German crisis of 1961,he thought a total,not limited,nuclear war was preferable to allowing the Soviet Union to construct the Berlin Wall.

During the period of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,Kissinger,to his considerable frustration,had very minor advisory roles. In so far as he had any influence it was over Vietnam. Kissinger became a back-channel in Paris for pointless secret negotiations where the North Vietnamese duped the Americans. He also travelled to Vietnam on three occasions,where he displayed an old soldierly courage. In private,Kissinger quickly realised the war was hopeless,although,characteristically,he also thought a US defeat in Vietnam would be an unmitigated disaster. In public he defended it.

Kissinger’s mind was torn between idealism and realism.

Kissinger's thoughts now turned to the fundamental question:How could the US withdraw from Vietnam without loss of"credibility". He had always shared the conventional New England academic contempt for Richard Nixon. When,however,he was offered the post of National Security Adviser by the new President,he very speedily accepted. His patron,Rockefeller,who lost the race for the 1968 Republican Presidential candidacy,rewarded him for his services with a cheque for $50,000,a vast sum for that time.

Over the next five years,in Nixon and Kissinger's joint search for a credible US withdrawal from the Vietnam quagmire,hundreds of thousands of lives would be meaninglessly lost.

The first volume of Ferguson's Kissinger's biography is unfailingly interesting but also extremely self-indulgent. When the Kissinger family arrive in New York,Ferguson provides us with a portrait of America in the 1930s. When Kissinger arrives at university,several pages are devoted to a potted history of Harvard. In his exuberance,moreover,Ferguson altogether lacks an absurdity self-detector.

On one occasion,he argues that Kissinger's description of the Holocaust prefigures Primo Levi's. On another,he compares the back channel Paris talks at tedious length to Samuel Beckett'sWaiting for Godot. And on yet another,he argues that there is an interesting similarity in sensibility — I kid you not — between Henry Kissinger and Bob Dylan.

Kissinger is now popularly regarded as the archetypical foreign policy realist. His idealism,before reaching power,is the paradoxical central claim of the Ferguson biography. The argument is very confused.

At times Kissinger's supposed idealism is Kantian​,when for example he speaks in bellicose terms about the spiritual mission of the West. At other times it is Wilsonian,when he expresses a belief in national self-determination deep enough to advocate war over the question of German unity. And at yet other times Ferguson recognises the utter incongruity between the description of Kissinger as either a Kantian or Wilsonian idealist and his terrifying willingness to advocate limited or even total nuclear war.

As the biography advances,Ferguson shows,convincingly,the struggle in Kissinger's mind between his foreign policy idealism and a once-repudiated realism,seen in his ambivalence over the historical legacy of the genius of 19th-century foreign policy realism,Otto von Bismarck,and in his recognition of the superior judgment over Vietnam displayed by the leading contemporary American foreign policy realist of his own era,Hans Morgenthau.

Ferguson is probably right when he argues that,as he approached true political power,Kissinger's mind was torn between idealism and realism,with realism gradually gaining the upper hand. If the title of the first volume of this biography is Kissinger:The Idealist,my guess is that the second will be titled Kissinger:The Realist.

Ferguson's biography of Kissinger is neither a panegyric nor a demonisation. Although he is generally far too sympathetic to his subject,Ferguson recognises the over-weaning ambition and the cold ruthlessness of his subject's character,twice quoting Fritz Kraemer's warning to Kissinger that he was in danger of losing his humanity. From time to time he even acknowledges the moral monstrousness of his subject's ideas.

The deepest problem with the first volume of the biography,however,lies elsewhere,in its assumption that,despite his flaws,Kissinger will be remembered as one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers. There is nothing here that remotely justifies such a judgment.

Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University.

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