History and Henry Kissinger

Author(s): ROBERT L. BEISNER

Source: Diplomatic History , Fall 1990, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall 1990), pp. 511-527
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24912060

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History and Henry Kissinger

ROBERTL. BEISNER*

In the fall of 1969, after Chinese and Soviet armies had clashed along
their Ussuri River border, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin bluntly asked
National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger whether he expected the
Russians to launch an all-out attack against China. President Nixon's aide
answered "that as a historian, he had to allow for the possibility."1 Seven
years later, in a kind of valedictory of his years in Washington, Kissinger
remarked: "As a historian one has to be conscious of the possibility of
tragedy. However, as a statesman, one has the duty to act as if one's country is
immortal. I have acted on the assumption that our problems are soluble."2
Kissinger's historical consciousness went well beyond that of the
average politician's concern about how the historians' textbooks would rank
him. More than anv chief foreign affairs policymaker in U.S. history, he
decided on his actions and measured his accomplishments with his eye on the
fit between history's long stream and his own brief moment. "The
convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office," he has
written, "are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they
continue in office."3 His own words supply standards that can be used to
judge his record. And by those high standards it must be found wanting.
The years before Richard Nixon summoned him to Washington at the age
of forty-five are too well known to require much elaboration. A German Jew
who emigrated to the United States in 1938, Kissinger entered Harvard
University after serving in the U.S. Army in World War II. He captured
unusual notice both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. As a

I wish here to gratefully acknowledge the helpful critiques offered to me by the editor
and anonymous readers for Diplomatic History and by John Lewis Gaddis. I am, of course,
responsible for any errors that remain or for failing to accept criticisms that might better have
been accented.

'William G. Hyland, Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New
Yoik, 1987), 26.
2Peter W. Dickson, Kissinger and the Meaning of History (New York, 1978), 79.
3Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), 79.

511

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 512 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

Harvard professor of governme

of future foreign leaders in t
summers. Retaining his tenure
Council on Foreign Relations st
mobilized seminars, coordina
patronage of a generation of
Nelson Rockefeller.
Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote a series of influential
books: A World Restored, an epigrammatic narrative of the post-Napoleonic
settlement from which he drew lifelong lessons of statesmanship; Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy, which combined an advocacy of limited nuclear
war (later repudiated) with critiques of U.S. ties to NATO allies, all
punctuated by pithy maxims on the essentials of wise statesmanship; The
Necessity for Choice, a craftily written dissection of the Eisenhower era;
and The Troubled Partnership, a summary of his foreign policy views in
which he argued for sharing nuclear weapons with NATO allies and
t A An anr*1ir no 1 OA 1 l^tnoinrvar tunn nmKitir\nn f/M* t

major post in Washington but had to settle for part-time troubleshoot

and consulting in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He wro
foreign policy speeches for Rockefeller's tardy effort in 1968 to den
Richard Nixon the Republican presidential nomination. A few weeks af
the November election, Nixon invited Rockefeller's man to the Hotel Pierr
in New York, where he asked him to become his national security advis
Not long after pronouncing Nixon unfit to be president, the Harvard scho
had found a new patron.
The author of these studies, who continued to declare himself a historian
can claim a long, rich, and complex relationship with history. He has writt
on the philosophy of history (in his weighty undergraduate thesis, "T
Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant"). H
inveteratelv extracts lessons from historv. whether addressing nast or
present events. He has written not only a classic in nineteenth-cen
diplomatic historiography, A World Restored, but also mountai
memoirs of his years with Nixon: first White House Years, which ru
1,521 pages, then Years of Upheaval, covering the last eighteen months o
Nixon administration in 1,283 pages, or 2.3 pages per day.
Kissinger is a derivative philosopher. His disdain for bureaucracy com
straight out of Max Weber; his intermittent pessimism owes much
Spengler. The vision of the intuitive statesman booking passage on el
zephyrs of history arises from his reading of Hegel and Toy
Nonetheless, his sense of place in history, his constant appeal to history,
unique in the annals of U.S. policymakers. Here I will examine the Kissing
paradigm of an ideal statesman—what a great statesman must be and
will look at the Kissinger portraits of Metternich, Castlereagh,

Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1

1822 (Boston, 1957); idem. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, 1957); idem,
Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1961); idem
- Troubled Partnership: A Re-appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance (New York, 1965).

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HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 513

Bismarck, the three statesmen he ident

discounting his many accomplishments,
tragedy lay in the failure of this historical
own history-derived model of statesma
requirements of the American political
written little about past U.S. diplomatist
role of statesman he had so carefully re
recapitulate the very flaws he identified w
masters.

In referring to those who carry out a nation's foreign policy, most

writers use such neutral terms as "diplomats" and "policymakers."
Kissinger, suggesting a higher standard, writes of "statesmen." From
musings on the meaning of history comes his definition of statesmanship.
Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, though sometimes idiosyncratic i
interpretation and daunting in length (Harvard was thereafter moved to pas
new rules on the number of pages a student could write), typified the
widespread search for new sources of values in the post-Holocaust world of
the 1940s and 1950s. Raised an Orthodox Jew but bv then a skentic. Kissinger
found in Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant the source material for his own
philosophical quest. Where, he wondered, could one find a rationale for
seeking the good—for praiseworthy public action—in a world where forces
unanswerable to conscious human thought or emotion seemed to mock the
idea of free will?
The answers that emerged over time and through many books revolved
around the tension between necessity—identified with history—and
freedom. "History is the past," he wrote in his undergraduate paper, "and the
past represents the most inexorable necessity with which we live."5
History's "necessity" is imbedded in the layers of past events, chance, habits,
and inertia that shape the lives of men, women, and nations. For most, life's
path is set at birth: the human path bounded by parentage and social station;
the paths of nations by location, resources, and the bedrock of history. This
was grim business, offering the individual little incentive for moral behavior
or the opportunity to make a difference. History was "pitiless."6 But a gifted
and daring few, Kissinger believed, could break the bonds of necessity and
"transcend" events, infusing them with their own will and spirit. "The
past," he wrote, "sets the framework which our spirituality must
transcend." Freedom is the act of self-transcendance, occurring in the
knowledge of limits and in the face of the patient weight of necessity. The
meaning of an individual's life, of history itself, is located in such sorely
attained freedom.7
In these terms of life Kissinger found the ingredients of statesmanship.
A statesman dares the force of necessity, acts as if his nation were immortal.

Dickson, Kissinger, 70.

6Heray Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), 791.
7 Dickson, Kissinger, 70.

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 514 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

Never granted a certainty, he

the instruments of tactics a
grasp of the past. He mus
responsibility of a statesma
them," he writes in his memo
even heroic, qualities—wisdo
charisma—and he must have f
material resources. "I feel my
interview, "was in intuition o
From these personal qualities
strong, he strikes his opponen
finesse. Always, he acts with
moment arrives to push the ju
such opportunities are too rar
instant they appear.11 Bisma
most a statesman could do was
1 "19. T A
UJ ■ iiijivuu V/i w»vi TT Iivi'111»^ o t aat^ava^ vuviiku vivni TT

moments when they can impose their w

particularly opportune, when "the eleme
suddenly become fluid," creating "an unusua
grist for the mill of those with "the a
coherence on confused and seemingly random
All leaders must face the possibility th
tragically short. Kissinger had laid out a
success. Creativity is the lonely act of heroe
with circumstances," he writes in White House Years, "are usually
undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane. All around them there is commotion;
they themselves operate in solitude and a great stillness that yields, as the
resolution nears, to exhaustion, exhilaration, or despair."16
Kissinger focuses on the American political culture as the greatest
impediment to statesmanship. Like his confreres in the "realist" school, he
shakes his head over American moralism, legalism, and exceptionalism.
Unlike most realists, he identifies the culture of lawyers, merchants, and
salesmen as particularly damaging to wise diplomacy, for it has spawned a
feckless faith in bargaining for bargaining's sake. Believing that one can

^Kissinger, White House Years, 55.

"Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 178.
10Robert S. Litwack, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the
Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976 (New Yoik, 1984), 48.
^Harvey Starr, Henry Kissinger: Perceptions of International Politics (Lexington, KY,
1984), 63.
12Hyland, Mortal Rivals, 5.
13Michael Joseph Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge, 1986),
199.
14Kissinger, White House Years, 597.
15Stephen R. Graubard, Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind (New York, 1973), 299.
^Kissinger, White House Years, 598.

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 HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 515

always turn a deal means that the deal itself b

without a strategy to justify it. American
tragic view of conflicts between nations as im
everything in sight as negotiable.17 Policy
salesmen leads to committee decision making
split-the-difference compromise. Kissinger scor
pragmatism and the antithesis of strategy,
conceptualization.18
Other facets of American culture also vi
statesmanship, including materialism, emp
conception of government, and what Ki
objectivity." Americans always define problem
that key decisions will emerge from accumulat
willy-nilly without the benefit of the strategi
to sort out the vital from the trivial. This b
enemy of the inspiration, the intuition, an
statesman. "Genius cannot be quantified," d
catastrophe or tragedy."19
Although naturally aware that statesmen ne
Kissinger has repeatedly savaged bureaucracies.
escape from the grasp of history, then he mu
of institutions that embody precedent and his

of their work and how they do it, bureaucrats

of international politics. Their desire for objec
decisions until "all the facts are in," by which
have eliminated a policymaker's best option
embraces the status quo, approving small measures and celebrating
incrementalism as wisdom. Because a bureaucracy "exaggerates the technical
complexities of its problems," it reliably opposes new ideas as "unsound"
or "risky."21 Bureaucrats accumulate facts while statesmen make choices.
And they act the same the world over. In a pragmatic society like the United
States, "what passes for planning is frequently the projection of the familiar
into the future." In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, "doctrine is
institutionalized and exegesis takes the place of innovation."22
Kissinger first laid out these ideas in the doctoral dissertation that
became his first book, A World Restored. A statesman, he wrote, creates
"policy," the spirit of which is "diametrically opposed" to the spirit of
bureaucracy. "ITie essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on

17See Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, 176; and idem, White House Years, 522.
18Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy
(New York, 1977), 55-56; Graubaid, Portrait of a Mind, 231.
"John G. Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (New York, 1976), 18.
20See, for example, Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, 432; and idem. World
Restored, 317.
21Graubard .Portrait of a Mind, 101.
22Ibid.,299.

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 516 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

the correctness of an estimat

bureaucracy is its quest for
policy thrives on perpetua
relationships which can survive
risks; administration an avoidan
Kissinger gained high office
dominate the Washington bur
hand.
Before reaching Washington, Kissinger took many opportunities to
describe both the essence of statesmanship and the tragedies statesmen are
wont to suffer, particularly in his studies of Metternich, Castlereagh, and
Bismarck. Americans commonly associate the name "Metternich" with
European machinations of power politics and often link Kissinger with this
Austrian architect of the post-Napoleonic settlement. Though this popular
view is simplistic, Kissinger does write admiringly of the Vienna statecraft
of both Metternich and Viscount Castlereagh in A World Restored. "That
Europe rescued stability from seeming chaos was primarily the result of
[these] two great men," he writes.24 He applauds them for courageously
staving off popular demands to wreak vengeance on France. Metternich led
the way in seeking "equilibrium, and not retribution, legitimacy, and not
punishment."25 Kissinger's account of Mettemich's diplomacy, first in doing
battle with Napoleon and then in refashioning order from the wreckage of
war, occasionally approaches a tone of adulation: "It was a game whose
daring resided in the loneliness in which it had to be played, in the face of
non-comprehension and abuse by both friend and foe; whose courage lay in its
imperturbability when one wrong move might mean disaster and loss of
confidence might spell isolation; whose greatness derived from the skill of
its moves and not from the inspiration of its conception."26
But the last clause signals the limits of Kissinger's admiration.
Metternich's genius was "instrumental," not "creative"; the Harvard
historian described him as a "great tactician" but a "mediocre strategist."27
And his lack of strategy, or concept, would prove fatal to his nation.
Metternich executed his agile maneuvers for a reactionary state whose
foundations he never questioned. In an age of revolution and nationalism, he
sought the preservation of the status quo and suppression of nationalistic
aspirations. He spent his life "shoring up decaying buildings."28 Metternich
lacked the vision to risk tragedy while trying to escape the force of historical
necessity, "the ability," as Kissinger put it, "to contemplate an abyss, not

^Kissinger, World Restored, 326-27.

24IWd.,5.
^Stoessinger, Anguish of Power, 26.
^Kissinger, World Restored, 26.
^Graubard, Portrait of a Mind, 22.
28Ibid., 40; Kissinger, World Restored, 117.

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HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 517

with the detachment of a scientist, but as a chall

in the process."29
Kissinger finds even more to admire and yet a
Englishman, Castlereagh. His superiority lay in
the leap from the past, to cast Britain in a perma
stage. He saw in a moderate settlement the defen
such a settlement would prevent renewed arm
settlement, Castlereagh plunged into the h
mediating between Russia and Austria, suppor
France, all the while defying his countrymen's cr
Kissinger praises Castlereagh's wisdom in overcoming the
shortsightedness of an "island power." Historically, continental states (or,
he noted, contemporary Israel) could not count on a safe margin of security:
an enemy could possibly destroy them in an instant. They have forged their
alliances, raised their armies, and fought their wars accordingly. The British,
on the other hand (Kissinger had the United States in mind, as well), could
tkaîc nmtâoéîirA rftMr% /*f mntn

acting only when dire necessity—which they detected belatedly

it. Castlereagh broke from the island power's strategic vie
Britain at the core of the post-Napoleonic settlement. But he fa
his Cabinet, Parliament, or the British people with him. "The ac
policy," Kissinger writes, "is its ability to obtain domestic
"Legitimizing policy within the governmental apparat
harmonizing it with the national experience" are the most diff
most important of the statesman's concerns.30 Castlereagh d
such support.
Kissinger writes a kind of epitaph on Metternich's and C
ultimate failures:

The statesman is ... like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a
vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men
and who cannot validate its "truth," Nations learn only by experience; they
"know" only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their
intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth. It is for
this reason that statesmen often share the fate of prophets, that they are
without honour in their own country, that they always have a difficult task
in legitimizing their programmes domestically, and that their greatness is
usually apparent only in retrospect... The statesman must therefore be an
educator; he must bridge the gap between a people's experience and his
vision, between a nation's tradition and its future. In this task his
possibilities are limited

—tragically, Kissinger might have added. "A statesman who too far outruns
the experience of his people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus,
however wise his policies; witness Castlereagh. A statesman who limits his

^Kissinger, World Restored, 32Z

30Ibid., 326 (emphasis in original).

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 ^18 nTPT DMATTP HTCTHPV

policy to the experience o

witness Metternich."31
In 1968, Kissinger publis
perhaps most of all, Otto vo
The essay reflects Kissinger
dispatches from the 1850
knows no reciprocity." "G
man into the field on our s
and skillfully."33 Kissing
political daring, subscribing
could make weak nations
could render strong nations
jviosi important to tvissmger is msmarcK s revoiuuonary risic taxing in
foreign affairs. He molded rather than accepted reality. Posing as a
conservative, he "recast the map of Europe and the pattern of international
relations."35 Though Kissinger worries that Bismarck occasionally confused
his own will with what was right, he also identifies a spiritual core in the
Iron Chancellor that allowed him to understand the importance of placing
limits on his own and his nation's drive for power. In his undergraduate
thesis, Kissinger wrote that freedom originated in a "recognition of limits"
and in the setting of "boundaries to one's striving."36 And Bismarck's special
genius took the form of an acute self-knowledge that led him to convert
power into an "instrument of self-restraint."37
Sadly, Bismarck bequeathed neither his brilliant skills nor his self
restraint to his successors. After the kaiser cashiered him in 1890, German
statesmanship failed catastrophically, eventually bringing on the First
World War through maladroitness and abandonment of self-restraint.
Germany's drive for total security generated waves of insecurity among the
other great powers, resulting in die action-reaction ladder of escalation that
ended in the disaster of 1914. "Statesmen who build lastingly," according to
Kissinger, "transform the political act of creation into institutions that can
be maintained by an average standard of performance. This Bismarck proved
incapable of doing" because his own dominance blocked the rise of able
successors.38 Kissinger warned that "a society that must produce a great man
in each veneration to maintain its domestic or international nosition will

doom itself, for the appearance and, even more, the recognition of a great m
are to a large extent fortuitous."39 Max Weber called the movement fro

31Ibid., 329 (emphasis in original).

32Henty Kissinger, "The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck," Daedalus 97
(Summer 1968): 888-924.
33Ibid., 907.
34Wd.,908,906.
35Ibid., 889-90.
36Surr, Perceptions of International Politics, 67.
37Kissinger, "The White Revolutionary," 890.
38Ibid.
39Ibid„ 889.

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 HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 519

puiiüy uy luur uc iuiuc iu puiity uiruugu msuiuuuiis uie ruuuuizauuii ui

charisma,"40 and Bismarck's tragedy lay in assuming a stature tha
change impossible.
Metternich, the master manipulator, lacked the vision of recon
Castlereagh reached farther than his people were willing to f
Bismarck, the maker of a nation, left a legacy of "unassimilated gr
What about Henry Kissinger?
Commentators, most either adulatory or hypercritical, ha
dissected his record from the day he took office. With the passag
they have sharpened their knives, reflecting in part the diplomat
vogue since Kissinger left office. First came the cannot-tell-a-lie
righteousness of the Carter administration, denouncing Kissingerian
amorality, declaring open season against human rights violators, and calling
for an end to the "inordinate fear" of communism. Then came the Reagan
regime, proclaiming Soviet perfidy, spending record billions on military
hardware, resisting new arms control talks, and funneling weapons to Third
World counterrevolutionaries. Though Carter would later rediscover the
charms of containment and Reagan those of détente, neither embraced
Kissinger's record as a model for his own.
Balanced evaluation of Kissinger remains difficult. The most vital
documents will be locked away for years, and Kissinger owns the key. His
own memoirs, extensively quoting these documents, brilliantly and
manipulatively set the agenda for all writers who follow. Nor are his
memoirs complete, for he has yet to write about the Ford years. But no more
balanced are the 440-page Sideshow, in which William Shawcross blames
Nixon and Kissinger for all of the miseries befalling Cambodia at the hands
of the Khmer Rouge;42 or Seymour Hersh's 670-page The Price of Power,
which trivializes human psychology in its tunnel-vision argument that
everything Henry Kissinger did arose from an unquenchable lust for self
aggrandizement.43
Kissinger's record includes enough failures without inventing more. One
way to look at them is in the light of his own standards. How does his record
stack up against his own axioms of statesmanship? At a time when American
power seemed to be declining, the key challenge facing Kissinger (and Nixon)
was to transcend the paradigm of Cold War policy and bring the American
people with them in placing the United States on a new course in world
politics. How well did Kissinger do? In particular, how does his performance
compare to those of Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck?

40Robert J. Strong, Bureaucracy and Statesmanship: Henry Kissinger and the Making of
American Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD, 1986), 49.
41 Kissinger, "The White Revolutionary," 890.
4^William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New
York. 1979).
43Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New
York. 1983).

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 520 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

"From the outset," Richard N

direct foreign policy from t
Eisenhower administration, hi
left-wing Democrats, and his
Kissinger's contempt for t
monopolistic decision makin
achievements, including the o
SALT I treaty and détente with
January 1973; and Kissinger's 1
In 1969, Nixon and Kissinge
House control of foreign and
the National Security Council
The president told Soviet Am
messages through Kissinger in
Nixon and Kissinger's decision
outflanked other agencies an
Pennsylvania Avenue.45 To ge
channels of communication to o
arms control bureaucracy.46
trip to China, negotiations with
Germany over new East-West a
designed to set a new pattern
purpose of checking the centr
Nixon played this political ga
since his days at Harvard, revel
the Pentagon, boasting of it in
Kissinger writes: "For the thi
being completed in which the
indeed, was unaware of its exist
"like that of a Foreign Service o
The Nixon-Kissinger style p
Watergate crisis. Their obsession with secrecy and their zeal in plugging
news leaks on national security issues inspired the wiretapping mentality
associated with the "Plumbers," the Watergate theft, and the cover-up to
follow. Kissinger had earlier written that bureaucracies' "quest for
objectivity and calculability" might lead to "impasses" that only
"essentially arbitrary decisions" could overcome.50 Now he confirmed his
proposition.

^Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New Yoik, 1978), 340.
45Monis, Uncertain Greatness, 155.
46SÀd.,2ll.
47John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Post-war
American National Security Policy (New Yoik, 1982), 294-95.
48 Kissinger, White House Years, 411,831.
■^Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from
Nixon to Reagan (Washington, 1985), 70; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 224.
^Quoted in Strong, Bureaucracy and Statesmanship, 44.

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 HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 521

The Nixon-Kissinger modus operandi create

well. The SALT back channel left official U.S.
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
least once stammering in response to a So
proposals about which he was ignorant Smith
each other."51 President Thieu of South Vietn
details of the confidential parlays with the N
Thieu, and his withholding of information fr
to the collapse of negotiations late in 1972 a
Eve bombing raids of North Vietnam.
In his pursuit of personal control, Kissinge
able, knowledgeable officials, many with
problems.52 Subordinates who were suppose
had no share in forming quietly gutted them
concentrated policymaking system, Kissing
could either skim over large numbers of issue
seemed most important and most control
notorious lack of interest in Latin America with the crack that South
America was a "dagger pointed at the heart of the Antarctic."53 Nor could
his one-man operation serve him well in dealing with such complex economic
issues as oil shortages, the law of the sea, or monetary exchanges.
The price Nixon and Kissinger paid for their circle-the-wagons conduct
of policy, writes John Lewis Gaddis, "was an uninformed, sullen, and at
times sabotage-minded bureaucracy, a Congress determined to reassert its
eroded constitutional authority ... and, ultimately, the resignation of a
president."54 And, precisely because Nixon and Kissinger generated so much
concern about what might be going on behind the scenes, even their legitimate
successes became suspect—and vulnerable to erosion when their political
positions weakened.55
More particularly, how does Henry Kissinger compare with his
nineteenth-century models? In skill and cleverness he certainly belongs in
Metternich's company. But like Metternich he failed to inquire into the
merits and likely longevity of the system within which he toiled. His and
Nixon's efforts to build a new "structure of peace" actually amounted to an
elaborate design, consistent with the old international structure, to
strengthen the role of a United States suddenly beset by Soviet pretensions,

51Ibid., 63; William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White
House (Garden City, 1975), 449.
S^3addis, Strategies of Containment, 334.
^Strong, Bureaucracy and Statesmanship, 71.
^Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 275.
5%ee Morris, Uncertain Greatness, 285.

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 522 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

North Vietnamese tenacity, OP

at home. Kissinger, suckled
apparently never considered tr
within a new international par
Given such unrevolutionary
SALT I has received abunda
fundamentally insura intact as
as that seemed a possibility. K
Camp David, and the settlemen
almost surely trace its shor
deserves credit for backing W
reconciliation in Germany, ev
new assertiveness unsettlin
overtures to China and the S
diplomacy, just as Kissinger ha
That Nixon and Kissinger took
from Vietnam demonstrated
nostrums: in their early desi
1968 campaign notwithstandi
backlash, in their insistence on
and in their zeal to mete out ar
recall mat Vietnam was an înnentea war, mat suaaeniy witnarawing nan a
million troops without a decent quid pro quo was repugnant to most
Americans, and that the passionate clamors of the antiwar movement created
wobbly political footing and an atmosphere unconducive to serene
statesmanship as Nixon and Kissinger strained to break the bonds of
Vietnam.
But Kissinger's record is not diminished by insisting on its likeness to
Mettemich's in the attempt to shore up American dominance within the
familiar containment paradigm. Kissinger's many achievements can be
understood as an agile attempt by a wounded power's leader to find new
leverage for old policies. Kissinger strove to create a delicate balance
between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of
China, one that would benefit Washington. He sought American dominance
of and Soviet exclusion from the peace process in the Mideast. He searched
for ways to translate reduced assets into continuing power of decision in
Asia. The desirability of stable U.S. ties with the Soviet Union and the
feopie s Republic or cnina aoes not gainsay ms tanure to articulate a vision
of a postcontainment foreign policy. Despite periodic vaporings about
"peace," Kissinger never believably demonstrated how his cherished
equilibrium would benefit the world it stabilized.
Undoubtedly, anyone in the 1970s bent on launching the United States
on a radically different course in diplomacy would have faced great obstacles,
and old ways are always the most comfortable. But it was Kissinger, in
designing a model of statesmanship, who decried the mere projection of the
past into the future. Kissinger suggested that Metternich had spent his life
propping up the rickety edifice of the Austrian empire; we can question

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 HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 523

Kissinger's wisdom in using so much energy,

to perpetuate the postwar international order.
Kissinger repeated Bismarck's cardinal
successes came through tours de force: SALT
in Vietnam. He knew the need to institutiona
the effort to do so. A decade before publishin
warned against neglecting "organization" in
the mid-1960s he urged leaders to create polic
their successors in the 1970s.57 Unblushingly,
"truly significant" foreign policy success m
government channels: "No government should
sustain a tour de force based on personalities.
shaking up the Foreign Service bureaucracy af
in 1973. Instead he simply relocated his closed
the White House to Foggy Bottom. Eventually
Nixon's, leaving behind a striking policy reco
ur iicsii iiisuiuuuuai ariaugciiicuis lu uuuu uu iu
Part of Nixon and Kissinger's institutional failure resulted from
the risks involved in an open bid to attract support from the
Congress, and their own subordinates. By its nature, secret, lone
governance flies in the face of policy institutionalization, and K
addiction to secrecy adds piquancy to a reading of his account of Castl
failure to win over other Englishmen to his policies. Kissinger he
leader's need for domestic consensus applied to authoritarian a
democratic systems, but to fail this "acid test" in a democracy is esp
damning.
Measuring Kissinger's failure is not a simple matter. The postwar
American diplomatic consensus had already disintegrated when Kissinger
came to Washington. "The internationalist Establishment," Kissinger
writes, "collapsed before the onslaught of its children."61 If Kissinger had
seen in this collapse evidence of an outmoded diplomatic paradigm he might
have avoided Metternich's preference for sticking to accustomed policy
patterns. Instead, he saw those who had abandoned the paradigm as the
fainthearted whose nerve he would restore through a more dexterous
approach to containment.
That effort may have succeeded in part, but it also evinces, as do his
writings, his view of the statesman's relationship to a democratic public as a

Stanley Hoffmann, Duties beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical
International Politics (Syracuse, 1981), 230. See also Hoffmann's "The Return of Henry
Kissinger," New York Review of Books, 29 April 1982.
5'Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons, 432; idem, Troubled Partnership, 63.
'^Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 434.
59Monis, Uncertain Greatness, 291.
60Kissinger had no dearth of protégés, but they did not reappear in important policymaking
positions until the Bush administration came to power, twelve years after Kissinger's departure
from office.
61 Kissinger, White House Years, 65.

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 524 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

problem. The policymaker, h

of the conciliator because
ardently that appeasement
behind alliances (read: NA
notably difficult, because th
deterred enemy. No sooner
democratic public assaults
problem stems from a dem
succeed, which intensifies
impulse to negotiate agreem
that democratic statesmen s
of defying voters' whims—i
even in the teeth of vocal
inherent contradiction—which he never resolved—between the fundaments
of democracy and his call for inspired and heroic leadership.
A democratic statesman, Kissinger had written, must educate his public
m order to succeed. Atter becoming secretary ot state in iy/3, Kissinger
crisscrossed the nation, delivering over sixty foreign policy speeches. Though
unmistakably didactic, they seemed not to accomplish their purpose.64 He
bemoaned the state of public understanding. Appeasing critics was futile—
they would accept concessions without gratitude and then demand more.
Kissinger's bargaining power with North Vietnam drained away in the wake
of antiwar demonstrations; "some of the best people in our country," he
later wrote, "thought they could serve peace best by discrediting their own
government."65 He complained to South Vietnamese President Thieu in
October 1972 that "in the United States all the press, the media, and
intellectuals have a vested interest in our defeat."66 Foreshadowing Allan
Bloom, he saw the antiwar dissenters who took to the streets after the
Cambodian invasion as youths "brought up by skeptics, relativists, and
psychiatrists... rudderless in a world from which they [demand] certainty
without sacrifice."67 But the same Kissinger who cursed his domestic
opponents ana coûta write aoout now Nixon ana ne iouna witmn ourselves
the moral stamina to persevere while our society was assailed by doubt,"68
declared unequivocally in August 1973 that "no foreign policy—no matter
how ingenious—has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few
and carried in the heart of none."69
Kissinger ranked extremely high in popularity polls. Americans
obviously enjoyed and admired some of his diplomatic spectaculars. Their

62See, for example, Kissinger, Necessity for Choice, 45, 193; and idem. Troubled
Partnership, 19.
63For example, Kissinger, World Restored, 292-93; and idem, Years of Upheaval, 797.
^Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 306.
^Kissinger, White House Years, 1014.
66Nixon,/W,703.
67Kissinger, White House Years, 510. See also ibid., 214-15,282,551.
^Ibid., 70.
^Dickson, Kissinger and the Meaning of History, frontispiece.

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 HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 525

luiig-ienii suppuri iui lus general puiieics was nui su cviuciii. nissnigcr s
rejection of ideology in foreign affairs helps account for the thin
public support. His fellow citizens would perforce find emotional
satisfaction and their sense of purpose watching him painstakingly build his
equilibrium. "Our objective," he wrote, "was to purge our foreign policy of
all sentimentality."70 But politicians in the United States have found this
either impossible or undesirable. "Freedom" and "justice" meant much more
to Kissinger's public than "international order." Human rights resonated in
their hearts far more vibrantly than geopolitical triangulation.71 Kissinger
confused a fear of ideology's excesses with its condemnation. "In the late
twentieth century," Michael Joseph Smith writes, "to deny the relevance of
iHAnlnnv ic tn nrnrloim annthAr AAmnAtinn tHAnlnm; "72 DrAcirlAnt PorfAr'c

rally to "human rights" met a popular response, as did President Reagan

"doctrine" of aid to anti-Communist "freedom fighters," illustrating th
tenacious power of traditional American ideals. Kissinger put himself at ris
by neglecting them. Given the worldwide surge of enthusiasm for democracy
and human rights in the 1980s, he may eventually be described simply as a
pessimist with little faith in the appeal of freedom.73
Kissinger's intricate détente policy, bereft of familiar ideological
foundations, could attract only momentary public support. That
overpromised the benefits of détente was probably less significant than the
felt difficulty of grasping its meaning. This "structure of peace" seemed to
pat, as well as theoretically crude: reward good Soviet behavior, punish bad.
Sound or not in psychology, détente faltered in practice. A stretch of good
U.S.-Soviet relations, touted in colorful telecasts of summits and
settlements, provoked waves of hope and relief. Then Soviet misconduct
reappeared in the Mideast, or Angola. Yet Kissinger still bargained with the
Russians as though they could be trusted. Even a highly sophisticated public
would have found this pattern hard to accept. People long told of the innate
untrustworthiness of "totalitarian" states could only wonder at pictures of
Nixon and Kissinger complacently shaking hands and clinking glasses with
leaders of the world's two greatest totalitarian states. Henry Kissinger's
concention of détente micht reassure the neonle. criven the nromise nf rnftintr
down dangerous conflicts with the Soviet Union; but once reassured, how
were they to react when Kissinger asked them to back new confrontations
with Moscow every time the Kremlin transgressed the rules of détente?
Kissinger would later argue that he had crafted a détente policy too
subtle to attract durable public support and wondered whether democracies
could "combine both resolution and hope, both strength and conciliation."74

70Kissinger, White House Years, 191.

71See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 343.
72Smith, Realist Thought, 201.
73Monis, Uncertain Greatness, 93. On the dangen of neglecting the public's demand for
ideological nourishment see Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and US. Foreign Policy (New Haven,
1987).
74Kissinger, White House Years, 1247. See also ibid., 1143-44,1254-55; and Hoffmann,
"Return of Henry Kissinger."

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 526 DIPLOMATIC HISTORY

Getting a handle on policy subt

Kissinger's problems cannot b
Lasch wrote hyperbolically w
removed from American life,"7
beyond his nation's historical e
opinion, his not so disguised
public accountability, and his
norm of policy stewardship
enduringly comfortable, howev
might have won their allegian
seldom sought out allies. Onl
began sinking under Waterga
through his didactic speeches. H
Henry A. Jackson undermine
were available in Dean Acheso
Arthur Vandenberg and Everet
but not labor leaders. Poor political instincts prevented him from
mollifying sensitive ethnic groups, such as Jews angry at his apparent
insensitivity to human rights in the Soviet Union and Greeks irate at his
visible preference of Ankara over Athens at the time of Turkey's invasion of
Cyprus. He directed his formidable skills in manipulating people toward
suppressing competing centers of influence or initiative—in the bureaucracy,
Congress, the media, and the public at large. No independent constituency
would rush to his side when his policies fell into trouble. By 1976, critics on
the idealistic left condemned his cynicism, the neo-conservatives his naiveté
in the face of Soviet treachery.
Kissinger failed the "acid test" of securing domestic consensus for his
actions because he stepped outside the constraints imposed by the American
political tradition without reshaping that tradition itself. With its brawling
interest groups and vote-hungry politicians, veering one way and another in
appeasement of half-informed voters, this tradition retains a vital hold on
the American people. A statesman in such a society cannot gain public
support with policies forged in camera. Policies must take their chances in
the glare of public exposure or sacrifice the legitimacy only public approval
can bestow. Kissinger's policies rarely attained such legitimacy. Americans,
still believing in a national mission, did not warm to his realpolitik. Their
beliefs and values are the "necessity" of the American experience to which
Kissinger failed to accommodate himself.
Of course, Kissinger had foretold that the noblest of statesmen will risk
tragic failure. His model statesman was duty bound to stare tragedy in the
face. Precisely to give his nation freedom within a necessitous world of
nations, the statesman must transcend common experience. The attempt to
rise above necessity might fall short; the statesman may slip back into the
irresistible stream of precedent and custom. Or he may exceed historic limits,

'^Quoted in Morris, Uncertain Greatness, 299.

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HISTORY AND HENRY KISSINGER 527

leaving him unmoored from the people on

astronaut losing grip on the tether of his orbi
many of the very risks his vision of state
standards for success were high. Some of his
the American republic improbable. He emer
his historical models.

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