A terrific Kissinger interview with one glaring omission
There were some big beasts prowling the radio landscape at the weekend. Three fascinating interviews with men who use their voices in extremely different ways: a world-bestriding diplomat so old that he embodies the history of which he spoke; a good man whose concern for the less fortunate in society brought him to the verge of tears; and a rock star who distilled virtue signalling and confessional self-deprecation into an oddly charming mix.
Henry Kissinger was the subject of James Naughtie’s excellent Archive on 4: Kissinger’s Century (Radio 4, Saturday). At 99, he is “still thinking and writing about the state of the world” and Naughtie’s interview was structured around his latest book, on the great leaders he has known.
As a man who has been taken very seriously all his life, not in the least by himself, Kissinger is a formidable interviewee, if a little slow and gravel voiced at times. Naughtie structured the interview as a tour through the exceptional span of his life (a refugee from Hitler’s Germany he served with US intelligence in the war, and has been plugged into global politics at the highest level since the 1960s), touching on the circumstances, and fallout, of encounters with the likes of Chairman Mao, Charles de Gaulle, Anwar Sadat
and, of course, Richard Nixon.
Absorbing as Kissinger’s views were on Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War and American foreign policy during the Cold War, a glaring omission was any acknowledgement that one of the six case studies in Kissinger’s book was Margaret Thatcher, which no doubt would have been of huge interest to UK listeners. But Naughtie was far more interested in sounding out this eminence gris on the parlous state of international relations today – both within Europe (where he provoked upset only recently by suggesting that Ukraine should give up the Donbas in exchange for peace) and in Asia.
Kissinger’s responses were chillingly objective and steeped in the realpolitik for which he’s famous, though not without optimism. In the end, the picture that emerged was of a man who views everything through the lens of power, more concerned with pragmatism than compassion, and a man supremely of his time.
Different in just about every way was Martin Lewis’s interview on Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking (Radio 4, Saturday). It raced along, with Lewis seizing the reins from the moment that Robinson finished his introduction, proceeding at frantic pace to cover everything from his Scrabble-playing “rack management” to the BBC’S failure to recognise his youthful talent, his insistent political non-alignment and his successful career as the one thing he never actually calls himself – a consumer champion.
Robinson was sensible enough to let him run, tilting the interview towards key moments in Lewis’s life and career and – whenever things got a little too heart-on-sleeve – pulling the conversation back to politics and political realities. When Lewis flew off on a rant about confrontational politics, Robinson brought him down to ground by challenging him to be more deeply involved. Which led to the show’s big revelation (that Lewis’s application to be a crossbench peer had been turned down recently). Robinson is more known for his inquisitorial technique than taking a back seat, but this was a great interview, full of energy, honesty and passion – precisely because he let it be.
Another interviewee with a free flow of words was Bono, of the rock band U2, who was Lauren Laverne’s guest on Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sunday). This was one of Laverne’s more successful encounters of late, with a good lifetime portrait of the 62-year-old singer and campaigner forming around the death of his mother in his early teens, his difficult relationship with his father, and his fortunate choice of schoolfriends who coalesced into a world-beating band.
Laverne let him off the hook when she asked about U2’s controversial tax arrangements and he dismissed it loftily as unworthy of discussion (“There are many things to dislike about my band but this is not one of them”). But he was open and self-deprecating enough in regard to his other “annoying” character traits.
Oddly, he had bizarrely little to say about musical heroes and inspirations. This was reflected in an uninspired choice of songs, which felt picked more for good things they said about him than musical quality. Promoting his son’s band was a particular duff-note, especially when he called them “very good” within moments of opining, in relation to U2, that “the real enemy of great is very good”.
I’m not sure we learned anything about Bono that couldn’t be garnered from a flick through Wikipedia, but he was entertaining company.