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e Humbling of Henry Kissinger

e truth is that his tenure as secretary of state was often rocky, and as full of setbacks

as acclaim.

By Stephen Sestanovich

Benjamin E. 'Gene' Forte / CNP / Getty

DECEMBER 8, 2023 SHARE SAVED STORIES SAVE

 rilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of

unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by

B the 몭ood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries

and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them

treated Kissinger as the master of events.

is may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No

matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of

state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was often rocky, as full

of setbacks as acclaim. By the time he left government, he was viewed by many of his

colleagues as a burden, not an asset. Once out of office, the advice he gave his

successors was sometimes spectacularly wrong, and frequently ignored.

In President Richard Nixon’s 몭rst term, Kissinger presided over three big diplomatic

transformations—withdrawal from Vietnam, the opening to China, and détente with

the Soviet Union. When he became secretary of state, his policy dominance was

virtually unchallenged. He was the 몭rst (and, to this day, only) person ever to run the

State Department while serving simultaneously as the president’s national security

adviser. Outside of government, he enjoyed unprecedented global renown. Less than a

month after his Senate con몭rmation, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shan Wang: Henry Kissinger’s real legacy

Yet when Kissinger left office barely three years later, most of his ambitious schemes

were unrealized. Others had simply been rejected. On the left, many revile Kissinger

for the human costs of the policies he pursued; on the right, some still admire his
unsentimental use of military force. In fact, the real story of Kissinger’s tenure as

secretary of state is a tale in which, again and again, he encountered the limits of his

power, and found himself unable to impose his will.

he policies Kissinger developed largely in secret to help wind down the

Vietnam War enjoyed far less support once the war was over and they were

T subjected to more normal, open debate. His in몭uence ebbed steadily. In 1975,

Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon a year earlier, forced Kissinger to give up the

national-security job. Ford created further checks on Kissinger’s power by picking two

former congressional colleagues, Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, as

secretary of defense and CIA director, respectively. Congress itself voted into law a

series of challenges to Kissinger’s policies, something it had consistently failed to do

under Nixon. Perhaps worst of all, the secretary of state bore some of the blame for

Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election. e president’s campaign managers told reporters

they saw him as a vulnerability. So did Ronald Reagan, whose bid for the Republican

nomination centered in part on a promise to 몭re Kissinger.

Kissinger’s lost dominance was especially pronounced in what was arguably the central

arena of his policy: the stable relationship—known as “détente”—that he sought to

establish with the Soviet Union. His problems began with arms control. In November

1974, soon after Ford became president, Kissinger arranged a quick summit with the

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, hoping for a breakthrough in negotiating a long-term

treaty to limit each side’s strategic nuclear forces. But he was never able to turn the

framework they agreed on into a real treaty. One obstacle was a congressional

requirement that U.S. and Soviet forces be equal—at a time when Soviet missiles were

getting steadily bigger and more numerous. Outside experts claimed that Kissinger’s

framework couldn’t meet that test. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Paul Nitze—a senior

national-security official under Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B.

Johnson—insisted it would give Soviet forces a three-to-one advantage. (Privately,

Nitze was far angrier, calling the secretary of state a “traitor to his country.”)

Even harder for Kissinger to handle was opposition within Ford’s inner circle.

Rumsfeld, once he became defense secretary, was ready to take disagreements with

Kissinger right into the Oval Office, telling the president that the United States had

been losing its nuclear edge for a decade. At the CIA, Bush approved an assessment
largely endorsing Nitze’s critique. Outside the administration, Reagan echoed the

same charges. No surprise, then, that Ford eventually put the talks aside.

Kissinger found the ideological dimension of Soviet-American relations still more

vexing. He had promised Soviet leaders to expand trade ties by granting Moscow

“Most Favored Nation” tariff status, but he could not manage congressional demands

for freer emigration from the Soviet Union. e initiative collapsed, but not before

senior 몭gures in both Congress and the Kremlin concluded that Kissinger had been

deceiving them. On human rights more generally, the secretary of state was isolated

within his own administration. He did persuade the president not to meet with

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous and outspoken Soviet dissident, but three

other members of the Ford Cabinet de몭ed him and conspicuously attended an AFL-

CIO dinner in Solzhenitsyn’s honor. Even the young Dick Cheney, then the deputy

White House chief of staff, dissented: Détente, he argued, didn’t have to be all

“sweetness and light.”

Gary J. Bass: The people who didn’t matter to Henry Kissinger

Learning little from this opposition, Kissinger continued to hurt himself with scarcely

concealed disdain for opponents of the Soviet regime. (“You know,” he once joked,

“what would have happened to them under Stalin.”) e impact reached well beyond

Washington. When Reagan delegates to the 1976 Republican convention wanted to

repudiate Kissinger, they drafted a platform plank titled “Morality in Foreign Policy.”

Ford and his advisers—who had already banned official use of the word détente—felt

they had to allow it to pass.

Apart from arms control and human rights, Kissinger also had trouble imposing his

views on Soviet-American competition in the ird World. When he wanted to

launch a covert program to arm rebels against Moscow’s client regime in Angola, news

quickly leaked to e New York Times. Congressional Democrats, predictably, voted

to block the weapons transfer altogether. Less predictably, many Republican senators

—liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike—also joined in, giving the measure a

two-to-one majority. e president’s own party was deserting its celebrity diplomat.

Kissinger was furious, just as he had been earlier in 1975 when, with the fall of Saigon
approaching, he proposed a big increase in arms supplies for South Vietnam. To make

it happen, however, congressional approval was necessary—and again wanting. Ford

ultimately chose not to 몭ght the issue. Instead, in a speech at Tulane University, he

declared the war “몭nished as far as America is concerned.” e White House did not

even let Kissinger know that the game-over announcement was coming.

Much of the commentary on Kissinger’s career has presented him as the embodiment

of unchecked presidential power over foreign policy. But the pushback against his

policies grew steadily stronger as their downsides became better known. In the 1970s,

Congress became far more assertive on foreign policy, legislating issues including arms

control, human rights, foreign military sales, and covert action. Kissinger frequently

railed against the decade-long decline in national-security budgets, but this too was

part of his legacy. So were other institutional reforms, such as the Carter

administration’s creation of a human-rights bureau in the State Department and the

annual publication of global-human-rights reports. Other forms of pushback were less

foreseeable: e “most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era” surely

never imagined what Jimmy Carter’s high-pro몭le envoy to China—Leonard

Woodcock, the former head of the United Auto Workers—would tell his Beijing staff

at their 몭rst meeting: “Never again shall we embarrass ourselves before a foreign

nation the way Henry Kissinger did with the Chinese.”

After he left office, Kissinger kept much of the advice he gave his successors

con몭dential, probably thinking that a little mystery about the extent of his in몭uence

would only help his new consulting business. But enough is known about some of his

Oval Office meetings to challenge the common picture of presidents and advisers

listening reverently while Henry Kissinger shared his wisdom. Kissinger’s sustained

effort to reorient Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union provides a striking

example. Together with Nixon, he argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was cynically

exploiting the president’s naive antinuclear sentiments so as to tear apart the Western

alliance. Under perestroika, they argued, the Soviet threat was actually increasing, not

diminishing. Reagan ignored them—and over time harvested a global Soviet foreign-

policy retreat.

Kissinger’s shortfalls in office and after are not the whole story, of course. In his 몭rst

weeks as secretary of state, he was plunged into a crisis—Egypt’s surprise Yom Kippur
attack on Israel, followed by the OPEC oil embargo. e cease-몭re and

disengagement agreements he negotiated bolstered American in몭uence in the Middle

East, a region to which he had paid little previous attention. He seemed, to quote the

title of my colleague Martin Indyk’s recent book, the “master of the game.”

Yet here, too, the master’s record seems ripe for reassessment—and not just for his

early, forgivable missteps. At the start of the Yom Kippur War, Kissinger thought it

might be best to keep a low pro몭le and meet Israel’s needs indirectly, by contracting

with private companies to deliver arms. Nixon ordered his celebrity policy maker to

stop dithering and organize a U.S. airlift. “Do it now!” he barked. More serious is the

charge that, even at the height of his power, Kissinger had, of all things, a too-limited

conception of what diplomacy could achieve. e most it should try to accomplish,

he felt, was to stabilize the world, not to alter—much less transform—it. Hence, the

secretary of state was reluctant to take on the hardest parts of the Middle East puzzle

—above all, the clash between Israelis and Palestinians, still atop the headlines half a

century later.

From the December 2016 issue: The lessons of Henry Kissinger

Indyk traces Kissinger’s hesitation to the same sources others have cited: his

conservative view of history, his immersion as a scholar in the diplomacy of 19th-

century Europe, and his personal experience of 20th-century totalitarianism. All of

these drove home the value of stability. But, in looking to explain this conception of

diplomacy, we should not leave out what Kissinger surely learned from his own

bumpy record as secretary of state. No matter what the tributes and obituaries say,

every day on the job con몭rmed the limits of his power, the difficulty of overcoming

them, and his ability to make mistakes when he tried to do so.