Walter Isaacson - Kissinger: A Biography

PRAISE FOR KISSINGER

In illuminating Kissingers complex personality, Isaacson is compassionate and moving, and he captures Kissinger so vividly that the reader follows his maneuvers as if he were standing beside him. Isaacson has a grasp of history that is truly rare.

Robert A. Caro, author of The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Kissinger is a triumph. Isaacon writes... with sympathy, verve, imagination, insight, and a keen eye. A stunning achievement.

Stephen E. Ambrose, author of Nixon and Eisenhower

An absorbing work of vivid portraiture, tireless research, and provocative judgments.

Michael R. Beschloss, author of The Crisis Years

In its range and research, it is the book to end all books on Mr. Kissinger. For his aficionados, it makes compulsive reading; for students of his years of influence on United States foreign policy, it is compulsory.

Theodore Draper, The New York Times Book Review

Mr. Isaacsons work is a model of insight, delicacy, and fairness that moves at a lively pace through recent American history and re-creates, in considerable depth, the intellectuals and politicians who formed its foreign policy.

The New Yorker

Those who admire Kissinger will find much material in these pages to reinforce their favorable views. Kissingers detractors will find many warts. Readers who have heretofore shrugged Kissinger off as just another secretary of state will be sorely challenged.

John Eisenhower, The Philadelphia Inquirer

The first full-scale biography of the former secretary of state that examines not only his public life and policy but his origins and his activities since leaving office.... The author strives for and achieves a balanced objectivity. For a new generation of readers, for whom these years are fading into genuine history, it is must reading.

William Hyland, Foreign Affairs

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T O

B ETSY, WHO IS WORTHY OF HER NAME

Three decades after he left office, Henry Kissinger continues to exert a fascinating hold on the public imagination as well as intellectual sway over the nations foreign policy conversation. The longevity of his influenceand of his celebrityis greater than that of any other statesman in modern times. He remains the most prominent foreign policy intellectual in the world, his advice sought by corporate and political leaders, his rumbling voice a regular on the airwaves, his byline stamping frequent analytic essays.

Partly this prolonged prominence is due, as even his detractors concede, to the power of his intellect. Nowadays, policy discussion too often tends to be polarized, partisan, and propelled by the type of talking points that work well on cable TV shows. Even people who disagree with Kissinger tend to be impressed by the rigor, nuance, depth, and unsentimental sharpness of his arguments. His writings and pronouncements combine historical axioms with timely insights to produce the same mixture of sweep and specificity that distinguished his memoirs.

Now that global politics is no longer oversimplified by the clarity of the cold war, Kissingers approach of understanding and emphasizing balances of power has become even more relevant. Likewise, his fingertip feel for the worlds webs of interdependencehow an event in one corner of the planet will reverberate in anotherhas become more important in an era of complex globalization.

Despite his continuing prominence, however, he has been notably absent from any official role in government. From the time he left office at the end of the Ford administration through the terms of the younger George Bush, there have been three Republican presidents in office for almost twenty of the last thirty-two years. Yet none appointed Kissinger to any high post. Why?

The answer says as much about the political changes in the Republican Party, and in the country, as it does about Kissinger. Kissinger represents a conservative internationalism that is largely rooted in realism, realpolitik, power balances, and pragmatism. In this book, I have described how the opponents who did him most harm were not those on the dovish left or liberal Democratic side, but rather the neoconservatives or highly ideological Republicans who saw Americas global struggle in crusading, values-based, moral, and sentimental terms.

Ronald Reagan, as readers of this book will see, ended up being Kissingers most wounding ideological adversary. Although Reagan at various points considered having a rapprochement with Kissinger, in the end he was excluded from the administration. More important, Reagans approach to foreign policyas a crusade for freedom rather than as a quest for a stable balance of powercame to define the Republican view.

This was especially true after September 11, 2001, during the George W. Bush administration. Some Kissingerian realists, most notably Brent Scowcroft and to some extent Lawrence Eagleburger, went public with their skepticism of a crusading foreign policy. Kissinger likewise had qualms, but he expressed them in a hedged, nuanced, subtle way.

That was typical for two reasons. First, his views are invariably rather nuanced, and the complexities he saw involving Iraq and the greater Middle East were typically subtle, smart, and filled with ambiguities that turned out to be prescient. The world is a complex and dangerous place, and Kissingers great strength as an analyst (and his weakness at fitting in with more ideological conservatives) is that he is not very good at oversimplification. In addition, he is instinctively averse to open and outright challenges to people in power. This is particularly true when it comes to conservative Republicans in power, because he knows that their distrust of his ideological fervor is what has kept him exiled from office.

This relates to a core issue explored in this book, one that is, I think, even more valid today. I contend that Kissinger was one of the few realistsas opposed to idealiststo shape American diplomacy. In that approach he was a master. He had a feel for balances of power, spheres of influence, and realpolitik relations. He brilliantly created a triangular structure involving the U.S., Russia, and China, and that architecture preserved the possibility of Americas power and global influence after the debacle of Vietnam.

On the other hand, he did not always have the same feel for the role that idealistic valuessentiments, he would call themplay in allowing a democracy to operate openly and with sustained confidence at home and abroad. Nor did he fully appreciate, I argue, that the openness and messiness of Americas democracy is what gives strength, not weakness, to its foreign policy. He was thusunder Nixons dark tutelagetoo fond of secrecy, and too much in need of it.

Kissinger was not exactly thrilled by this argument or by this book when it first came out, even though he had given me many interviews. I think he was surprised that its critique came from the conservative side as much as from the liberal side. I also suspect, given the fact that he is not known for his thick skin, that he would probably be outraged if he reread his Nobel Peace Prize Citation or his own memoirs on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

For a while after the book came out, he didnt speak to me. Then, after I had become the managing editor of Time , he was invited back to an anniversary party featuring all who had been on the cover. The phone rang and his distinctive voice came on to say, Well, Walter, even the Thirty Years War had to end at some point. I will forgive you. (He did allow that his wife, Nancy, both loyal and smart, was partial to the Hunded Years War.) Since then, we have worked together on various projects, including a Middle East program at the Aspen Institute.