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Summary
Summary
The definitive biography of Henry Kissinger, based on unprecedented access to his private papers
No American statesman has been as revered or as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Once hailed as "Super K"--the "indispensable man" whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama--he has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every "telcon" for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this magisterial two-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger's hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding.
The first half of Kissinger's life is usually skimmed over as a quintessential tale of American ascent: the Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany who made it to the White House. But in this first of two volumes, Ferguson shows that what Kissinger achieved before his appointment as Richard Nixon's national security adviser was astonishing in its own right. Toiling as a teenager in a New York factory, he studied indefatigably at night. He was drafted into the U.S. infantry and saw action at the Battle of the Bulge--as well as the liberation of a concentration camp--but ended his army career interrogating Nazis. It was at Harvard that Kissinger found his vocation. Having immersed himself in the philosophy of Kant and the diplomacy of Metternich, he shot to celebrity by arguing for "limited nuclear war." Nelson Rockefeller hired him. Kennedy called him to Camelot. Yet Kissinger's rise was anything but irresistible. Dogged by press gaffes and disappointed by "Rocky," Kissinger seemed stuck--until a trip to Vietnam changed everything.
The Idealist is the story of one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. It is also a political Bildungsroman , explaining how "Dr. Strangelove" ended up as consigliere to a politician he had always abhorred. Like Ferguson's classic two-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds dazzling new light on an entire era. The essential account of an extraordinary life, it recasts the Cold War world.
Author Notes
Niall Ferguson was born April 18, 1964, in Glasgow. He is a Scottish historian. He specializes in financial and economic history as well as the history of empire. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
His books include Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (1993), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (1998), The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (1998), The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (2001), Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003), Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006) and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011) , The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, and The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the first of a planned two-volume Henry Kissinger biography, Harvard historian Ferguson (Civilization: The West and the Rest) traces Kissinger's life from his birth in Germany in 1923 through his service in WWII and growing career as a foreign policy expert, culminating in his 1968 appointment as national security advisor to newly elected President Richard Nixon. To readers' benefit, this is as much a history of post-WWII and Cold War foreign policy as a biography of Kissinger. Jumping off from Kissinger's high-level involvement in the 1961 Berlin Crisis and his role as an advisor in the early years of the Vietnam War, Ferguson offers a detailed and provocative examination of how foreign policy is developed in the midst of theoretical and political crosscurrents. Kissinger's views on Vietnam and his involvement in several failed Johnson administration Vietnam peace initiatives provide a deeper dimension to the complexities of American Vietnam policy. Ferguson also takes ample time to describe the Machiavellian jockeying for influence and power among high-end government officials. There is little discussion of Kissinger's personal life, and readers looking for such detail or psychological speculations will be disappointed. Some may see this complicated, generally admiring view of Kissinger as overly generous, but Ferguson endeavors to provide nuance around Kissinger's approaches to the challenges of Cold War foreign policy. Agency: Wylie Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In chronicling the maturation of a man widely regarded as the Machiavellian embodiment of realpolitik, Ferguson unfolds a Goethean bildungsroman in which an idealist struggles to articulate and apply his ideals in the face of ever-shifting challenges. Reflecting the author's unprecedented access to Kissinger's personal papers, this detailed narrative shows a young refugee from Nazi-dominated Europe returning to the Continent as a zealous American intelligence officer who relishes the triumph of American ideals but must serve superiors pragmatically modulating those ideals as they scale back their denazification program. Readers subsequently follow the veteran who deepens his idealism as a Harvard student drawn to Kantian morality and to nineteenth-century European history. That philosophical historical perspective subsequently wins the young scholar fame as a Harvard professor whose political theorizing probes difficult issues. The strength of this biography indeed lies in the illumination of Kissinger's abiding commitment to his intellectual-moral principles as he shoulders the responsibility of advising political leaders Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Rockefeller, and Nixon. It will surprise many readers how quickly Kissinger finds his principles incompatible with the Kennedy-Johnson policy in Vietnam, and how reluctant he is to serve under the devious Nixon. A sophisticated portrait, certain to stir debate and to heighten expectations for the sequel.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT IS VERY rare for an official biography to be also a revisionist biography, but this one is. Usually it's the official life that the revisionists attempt to dissect and refute, but such is the historical reputation of Henry Kissinger, and the avalanche of books and treatises already written about him, that Niall Ferguson's official biography is in part an effort to revise the revisionists. Though not without trenchant criticisms, "Kissinger. Volume I. 19231968: The Idealist" - which takes its subject up to the age of 45, about to begin his first stint of full-time government service - constitutes the most comprehensive defense of Kissinger's outlooks and actions since his own three-volume, 3,900page autobiography, published between 1979 and 1999. Unlike the revisionists, Ferguson has had access to every part of Kissinger's vast archive at the Library of Congress, which weighs several tons and comprises 8,380 documents covering 37,645 pages on the digitized database alone. These include a heartfelt essay on "The Eternal Jew" written by the 22-year-old German-born Sergeant Kissinger after witnessing the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp; some loving but uncompromising letters to his parents about his separation from their Orthodox faith; a jejune and somewhat cringe-making teenage note to a would-be girlfriend; and the minutes he took as secretary of a Jewish youth organization to which he belonged as the Nazis were seizing power in his homeland. Although this book is long at 986 pages, and Kissinger has only just joined the Nixon administration as national security adviser when it ends, the sheer quality of the material unearthed justifies the length and detail. Ferguson gives the full story of the Kissinger family's experience under the Third Reich before they emigrated in 1938, and Ferguson has identified at least 23 close family members who perished in the Holocaust. (Of the 1,990 Jews who lived in their hometown, Fürth, in 1933, fewer than 40 were left by the end of the war.) The first chapters covering the Kissingers' life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York recapture the Jewish immigrant experience superbly and put into perspective the fact that Henry (born Heinz) became the first foreign-born United States citizen to serve as secretary of state. Whereas Kissinger has regularly underplayed his bravery during World War II, Ferguson shows that he saw action during the Battle of the Bulge, where he came under severe shelling. "His very presence" in the Meuse town of Marche "was hazardous in the extreme," Ferguson writes, as German 88s, mortar shells and a V-1 rocket pulverized "the narrow streets of the town center where the divisional HQ was based." After V-E Day, Kissinger became an extremely effective Nazi hunter with the Counter-Intelligence Corps. The subtitle of the book will surprise many for whom Kissinger's name is almost synonymous with modern realpolitik and who are familiar with the revisionist accounts that equate him with Machiavelli, Bismarck and other such thinkers and statesmen normally thought far from idealists. Yet Ferguson's investigation of Kissinger's intellectual roots, especially through the influence of his Army mentor Fritz Kraemer and his Harvard supervisor William Yandell Elliott, shows Kissinger was indeed an idealist in the Kantian sense, rather than in its modern American political version. Kissinger's unpublished senior thesis, "The Meaning of History," was an investigation into Immanuel Kant's philosophy of history, especially in contrast to the views of Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, although Ferguson slightly dismisses it as "an exercise in academic exhibitionism." In his thesis, Kissinger argued that "freedom is ... an inner experience of life as a process of deciding meaningful alternatives" and that "whatever one's conception about the necessity of events, at the moment of their performance their inevitability could offer no guide to action." He also said, "However we may explain actions in retrospect, their accomplishment occurred with the inner conviction of choice." The importance of choice led Kissinger to a belief in democracy. "Kissinger was never a Machiavellian," Ferguson argues, but neither was he an idealist of the Woodrow Wilson variety. "It was an inherently moral act," Ferguson says of Kissinger's outlook, "to make a choice between lesser and greater evils." WHAT BROUGHT KISSINGER to huge public prominence while still only an assistant professor was his radical prescription for how to deal with the perceived (though in fact chimerical) relative weakness of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union at the time of the successful launch of the Sputnik space satellite in October 1957. As Ferguson puts it, "Sputnik launched Kissinger into a new orbit." Kissinger had only months earlier published his widely reviewed and highly controversial best seller "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," which argued that the threat of a limited nuclear war was a more effective deterrent to Soviet incursions in the third world than the Eisenhower administration's strategy of mutually assured destruction. And as Kissinger wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, "The best opportunity to compensate for our inferiority in manpower" is "to use our superiority in technology to best advantage" (although he did rule out using any bomb of more than 500 kilotons in a tactical situation). For Ferguson, Kissinger's argument "fails to convince," but it won Kissinger interviews on "Face the Nation" and with The New York Herald Tribune that - once his accent and acerbic wit came to be appreciated by the American public - put him on the trajectory to intellectual rock star status that he never lost. Partly because he described himself as an independent, Kissinger could be called upon by both political parties for advice. After failing to make an impact as a consultant to the Kennedy administration - he didn't like the men or the methods, and they didn't see him fitting the Camelot image - he went to work for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Ferguson is clearly fascinated by what he calls the "turbulent friendship" between the aristocrat and the immigrant, and is at pains to point out that "Henry Kissinger has often been portrayed as very ruthless and calculating in his pursuit of power. But in committing himself again and again to Rockefeller, he failed to see that he was backing a man who would never be president." Kissinger's loyalty was based on affection and genuine admiration, rather than mere miscalculation. Ferguson's access to the diaries Kissinger kept before, during and after his visits to Vietnam in 1965 and 1966 allows him to argue, totally convincingly, that on his missions for the Johnson administration, Kissinger realized very early on that the United States had little or no hope of winning the war and therefore needed to enter into direct negotiations with Hanoi sooner rather than later, albeit from a position of strength. This book contains the first full account of the abortive initiative to start talks with Hanoi in 1967 ; as Ferguson puts it, "to an extent never previously recognized by scholars," Kissinger attempted "to broker some kind of peace agreement with the North Vietnamese, using a variety of indirect channels of communication to Hanoi that passed through not only Paris but also Moscow." Yet it is in Ferguson's comprehensive demolition of the revisionist accounts of the 1968 election by Seymour Hersh, Christopher Hitchens and others that this book will be seen as controversial. For he totally rejects the conspiracy theory that blames Kissinger for leaking details of the Paris peace negotiations to the Nixon camp, details that enabled Nixon, it was said, to persuade the South Vietnamese that they would get better treatment if he and not Hubert Humphrey were in the White House. Ferguson goes into this theory in great detail, disproving it on several grounds, but especially for its lack of even the most basic actual or circumstantial evidence. (It turns out that one of the reasons Kissinger was in Paris in 1967 was that he was secretly going to the Sorbonne to woo the only great love of his life, Nancy Maginnes, whom he subsequently married.) Of course it will be in the second volume that Ferguson will come to grips with the revisionists' attacks on Kissinger's actions involving places like Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and Bangladesh. The book's introduction strongly implies that he will be acquitting Kissinger of the monstrous charge of war criminality that the revisionists have made over the years. Yet this is no hagiography. As well as being highly critical of Kissinger's theory of limited nuclear war, Ferguson describes a letter of his as a "solipsistic screed"; says of one of Kissinger's books that it "remained, at root, the work of a committee"; and states that Kissinger was "even more demanding to his own subordinates" than Rockefeller was to him: "He learned to rant and rage." The criticisms - and there are many more waspish ones - absolve Ferguson from the charge of whitewashing Kissinger and make his praise all the more credible. This is an admiring portrait rather than a particularly affectionate one. Ferguson acknowledges in his preface all of the "conversing with him, supping with him, even traveling with him" that he did over the many years he spent researching and writing this book. But if Kissinger's official biographer cannot be accused of falling for his subject's justifiably famed charm, he certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the Republic, someone who has been repulsively traduced over several decades and who deserved to have a defense of this comprehensiveness published years ago. Part of Kissinger's charm of course derives from his highly developed sense of humor, which is given full rein here. "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes," he once joked. "There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy." When someone came up to him at a reception and said, "Dr. Kissinger, I want to thank you for saving the world," he replied, "You're welcome." All of this was delivered in the trademark voice that the journalist Oriana Fallad described as like "that obsessive, hammering sound of rain falling on a roof." Niall Ferguson already has many important, scholarly and controversial books to his credit. But if the second volume of "Kissinger" is anywhere near as comprehensive, well written and riveting as the first, this will be his masterpiece. ANDREW ROBERTS is the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.
Choice Review
This elegantly crafted account of the first 45 years of its subject's protean life could readily be retitled, "the education of Henry Kissinger." Some lessons learned were salutary; among them, personal encounters with Nazis, which cemented Kissinger's hatred of totalitarianism. Some were bitter, as when erstwhile patrons such as William Elliott (his Harvard mentor), McGeorge Bundy (his conduit to the Kennedy administration), and Nelson Rockefeller (his political lodestar) in different ways let him down. Ferguson (Harvard) has left no stone unturned in tracing Kissinger's odyssey from his childhood in Fürth, Germany, through his appointment as Richard M. Nixon's National Security Adviser in 1969. He portrays an avid cold warrior who believed that the spiritual values of the West, combined with a willingness to risk all-out nuclear war in facing down the communist adversary, were prerequisites for democracy's ultimate triumph. Above all, Ferguson connects Kissinger's ideas with high-level policy making, highlighting the idealist thread running through his subject's thinking and writing. Sure to generate scholarly debate, notably regarding Ferguson's take on Kissinger and realpolitik, this is a book that no future student of Kissinger's life and times can afford to ignore. A very worthwhile read. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students and up. --Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College
Kirkus Review
Exhaustive account of the first half of Kissinger's life as a "tale of an education through experience." Courted by Kissinger to write this biography 10 years ago ("it was written at his suggestion"), Hoover Institution senior research fellow Ferguson (History, Harvard Univ.; The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, 2013, etc.) is both fascinated and seduced by the dazzling intellectual breadth of the senior statesman, now in his 90s. From Kissinger's childhood in Germany, as the Nazis were ascendant, to participating in the official U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War, the author finds Kissinger's development falling into formative stages: seeing his civil servant father stripped of his livelihood and the family terrorized as Orthodox Jews before escaping to New York in 1938; returning to Germany via the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, followed by de-Nazification work in the ruins of the Third Reich; schooling at Harvard courtesy of the GI Bill, where he found an important mentor in William Elliott and the choice of history for his academic work, specifically the sometimes-fraught choices that freedom awards an individual; his role as a public intellectual, writing about the new "great game" in "psychological warfare" just as the Cold War was heating up; and, finally, the harsh lessons he gained in political reality as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and as one of John F. Kennedy's fallible "best and brightest." In his pronouncements on the war in Vietnam, Ferguson insists Kissinger was an idealist first and foremost: he was "committed to resisting the Communist advance and an advocate of limited war.' " Bit by bit, Kissinger was becoming a foreign policy expert with "few rivals." Ferguson also gives a thoroughsometimes long-windedassessment of Kissinger's use of conjecture and risk in policymaking. A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) study of the formation of the young Kissinger, before the idealist became a realist with his selection by President Richard Nixon as national security adviser in 1968. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The purpose of Ferguson's (history, Harvard Univ.; The Great Degeneration) extraordinary biography of Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) is not simply to tell his life story but to convince readers that, in terms of philosophy, Kissinger was an idealist instead of a realist. Ferguson performs both feats in this massive first volume using access to private papers, letters, and many interviews with Kissinger himself. Five subsections cover everything from Kissinger's childhood to his service in World War II to his years as a student at Harvard University, his burgeoning career as a political advisor in the years preceding the Vietnam War, and the moment when Richard Nixon appointed him national security adviser in 1968. Paired with the exploration of Kissinger's philosophy as his life changes, this biography becomes essential as a study of the 20th century. The text has rare footnotes and concludes with over 150 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. VERDICT An unequaled portrait of Kissinger. While this may be a difficult read for the layperson, fans of Ferguson, Kissinger, biographies, history, and political and philosophical thought will rejoice. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway -Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Preface | p. xi |
Introduction | p. 1 |
Book I | |
Chapter 1 Heimat | p. 35 |
Chapter 2 Escape | p. 62 |
Chapter 3 Fürth on the Hudson | p. 82 |
Chapter 4 An Unexpected Private | p. 112 |
Chapter 5 The Living and the Dead | p. 137 |
Chapter 6 In the Rums of the Reich | p. 169 |
Book II | |
Chapter 7 The Idealist | p. 209 |
Chapter 8 Psychological Warfare | p. 244 |
Chapter 9 Doctor Kissinger | p. 291 |
Chapter 10 Strangelove? | p. 330 |
Chapter 11 Boswash | p. 386 |
Book III | |
Chapter 12 The Intellectual and the Policy Maker | p. 421 |
Chapter 13 Flexible Responses | p. 461 |
Chapter 14 Facts of Life | |
Chapter 15 Crisis | p. 514 |
Book IV | |
Chapter 16 The Road to Vietnam | p. 581 |
Chapter 17 The Unquiet American | p. 626 |
Chapter 18 Dirt Against the Wind | p. 667 |
Book V | |
Chapter 19 The Anti-Bismarck | p. 693 |
Chapter 20 Waiting for Hanoi | p. 731 |
Chapter 21 1968 | p. 786 |
Chapter 22 The Unlikely Combination | p. 835 |
Epilogue: A Bildungsroman | p. 865 |
Acknowledgments | p. 879 |
Notes | p. 883 |
Sources | p. 925 |
Illustration Credits | p. 946 |
Index | p. 947 |