Travels With Henry talks about the life and times of Dr Kissinger

As a young man, he was exposed to the ravages of tyranny and war, and he would later champion the cause of bringing two nations together

In his book TravelsWithHenry, veteran US journalist Richard Valeriani describes a scene in which Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and later secretary of state to president Richard Nixon, “walked in on some elaborate State Department setup on the road”. “He would invariably ask, ‘ Who are all these people?’ And then he would point out with some disdain, ‘I opened up China with five people,’” Valeriani wrote.

“He was a different man in China,” wrote the international affairs reporter, who “jetted over half a million miles (804,000 kilometers)” with Kissinger, watching him “negotiating his way through Moscow, Peking (Beijing), Cairo, Jerusalem and many other world capitals”.

Kissinger, who played a key role in laying the foundations for today’s international geopolitical structure by building what he called “the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship”, died at his home in Connecticut on Nov 29. He was 100.

By helping to end more than two decades of hostility between the United States and China, Kissinger also succeeded in drastically changing the US’ public perceptions of the world’s most populous country at that time and in “(putting) before our people a vision transcending the travails of the Vietnam War and the ominous vistas of the Cold War”, said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s former top aide, one of those the secretary of state had in mind when he talked about “five people”.

“Henry’s demand for excellence could have a chilling effect on people who worked for him,” said Lord, who at dawn on July 9, 1971, was sitting with Kissinger and two other US people on a Pakistani plane as it skirted the planet’s second-tallest peak before entering Chinese airspace.

“Yet for those of us who lasted with him, Henry stretched their patience but also their perspective. He extended my horizon, and the sights were sublime, literally.”

The secret visit, which catapulted Kissinger to international fame, would be followed by Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in February 1972 and by “many consuming years of agony and ecstasy” in which Lord would watch Kissinger “whiffing ping-pong balls beneath golden rooftops arching to the heavens” and inform him during one of his rare bedridden stints that “your staff has voted for you to remain ill for another day so that they can get some rest”.

“Henry was prone to occasional outbursts against his staff … he usually found a way to circle back with a sheepish gesture,” Lord wrote in his foreword to the book Kissinger onKissinger, which comprised a number of riveting interviews Lord did with his mentor between 2015 and 2016. The Chinese translation of the book has recently hit shelves in China.

“Beneath his carapace lies a gentle soul,” Lord said.

That gentle soul was once trampled by the heavy boots of Nazi soldiers. In 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Kissinger, then 15, fled his hometown of Fuerth, northern Bavaria, with his Jewish parents and younger brother. He would wait for six years to set foot on German soil again, this time as a US Army intelligence officer. Years later, in a homecoming that was perhaps even more triumphant, Kissinger the national security adviser, after noticing that “visiting relatives” was on the official calendar, told his aides, “My relatives are soap.”

“Maybe what my European origin has done for me is to help me understand that not all things are possible, and that nations can suffer tragedies if they do not act with wisdom and dedication and foresight,” said Kissinger, who later said he regarded “the ability to project beyond the known” as a touchstone of his policymaking.

For Lord, the traumatic experience was sobering enough to allow Kissinger to stay cool-headed in the rhetoric-fueled years of the Cold War. “Kissinger is a mix of an American immigrant’s sense of optimism with a European sense of tragedy. He understood that America is very fortunate to have got two oceans, friendly borders and abundant resources, but he was aware of the limits of what she can achieve. Knowing that history would rein in the expectations of any country, he tended to be more muted about our possibilities.”

In Germany in 1945 Sergeant Kissinger had “one of the most horrifying experiences” of his life when his division stumbled upon a concentration camp at Ahlem, northwestern Germany.

“That is humanity in the 20th century,” Kissinger lamented in an article, after being told by one of his fellow soldiers that he had to kick emaciated bodies to determine who was alive and who was dead. “People reach such a stupor of suffering that life and death, animation or immobility can’t be differentiated anymore,” Kissinger wrote.

The writing was cited in the 2015 book Kissinger1923-1968:TheIdealist by Niall Ferguson, who recounted in the preface “my introduction to the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger”, after he said he had turned down a proposal by the former diplomat for him to pen his biography.

“What a pity! I received your letter just as I was hunting for your telephone number to tell you of the discovery of files I thought had been lost: 145 boxes which had been placed in a repository in Connecticut by a groundskeeper who has since died. These contain all my files.”

A few weeks later Ferguson was in Kent, Connecticut, “turning pages” and immersing himself in Kissinger’s previously closed private papers, personal correspondence and academic writings from Harvard, where he stayed between 1947 and 1971, as a student and later as a professor.

“One of the first things that struck me is that he didn’t seem to have the right bibliography for a realist thinker,” said Ferguson, who would assert in his book that “the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding”.

One of Kissinger’s writings the author had in mind was his undergraduate thesis The Meaning Of History. Its 383 pages not only offered a taste of the intellectual brilliance that would later allow Kissinger to engage some of the world’s brightest minds, but is also the longest-ever thesis written by a Harvard senior. Indeed it prompted the college to come up with “the Kissinger rule” limiting all such endeavors from its undergraduate students to about one-third of that length.

‘Noblest goal’

“Peace is therefore the noblest goal of human endeavor, the affirmation of the ultimacy of man’s moral personality,” Kissinger wrote in The Meaning of History, referring to his study of Immanuel Kant, the man “who has influenced me the most”.

In his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical now considered a classical source of modern idealism in international relations, the German philosopher takes up the question of whether perpetual peace is the preserve of men in their graves.

Answering in the negative, Kant elaborates on the conditions necessary for the establishment of perpetual peace among nations, arguing that statesmen have a moral obligation to seek those conditions. For Kissinger, who entered the political realm as a nuclear strategist and consultant to president John F. Kennedy, the answer could also be a catastrophic yes, “invited by our shortsightedness”.

A day after Kissinger became US secretary of state he told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept 24, 1973: “Two centuries ago the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come eventually. … What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow’s reality.”

Ferguson said: “Although Kissinger ceased to be much concerned with philosophy, almost all his writings after 1950 are essentially historical, he kept referring to Kant. By doing so he was trying to signal to the world that he was not a realist, but the world didn’t want to listen.”

People had tended to see Kissinger as a contemporary equivalent to the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich or the German unifier Count Otto von Bismarck, Ferguson said, both power manipulators in a hotly contended 19th-century Europe that Kissinger had studied, because “it was a kind of easy story to tell”.

One of the latter instances when Kissinger referred obliquely to the Kantian idea in relation to the nuclear age was when he talked to Lord in a series of interviews that formed the 2019 book Kissinger on Kissing er: Reflections Leadership.

“In the American public discussion the issue is often put this way: you have the choice between coexistence and detente or … but then the question is … or what?” said Kissinger, a major initiator of the detente policy toward the Soviet Union during the 1970s, detente being a French word meaning relaxation. “The nuclear equilibrium in a way condemns you to some kind of coexistence.”

Promoting greater dialogue with the Soviet Union, this core element of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was carried out in tandem with US opening to China — “mutually facilitating efforts that preserved American influence after the debacle of Vietnam”, Lord said.

“We agreed from the beginning that we should open to China,” recalled Kissinger, who had been tapped by Nixon after having, as principal foreign policy adviser to Nixon’s main Republican rival Nelson Rockefeller, “spent 15 years of my life trying to keep him from becoming president”.

Strategic vision aside, the two trusted one another, evident during Kissinger’s 1971 secret visit to China. “We never went off in July 1971 being told by Nixon, ‘ Now be very careful,’” Kissinger recalled. “When we went off, we were told, ‘Get this done!’”

And he did it, partly by feigning stomachache on the last leg of a publicly announced trip that included Vietnam, Thailand, India and Pakistan. While Kissinger was supposedly recuperating in a hill station, the Pakistanis, who had been acting as a major channel of communication between the Americans and the Chinese, ferreted him and his four-man group to an airport in Islamabad in the wee hours of July 9.

Of the 49 hours Kissinger stayed in Beijing, 17 were spent in conversation with China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, with whom he drafted the Shanghai Communique, later finalized by the two during Nixon’s 1972 visit. “Fifty years later it’s still being invoked as one of the foundations of our relationship, while most communiques disappear within weeks,” Lord said.

Depicting Zhou as “equally at home in philosophical sweeps, historical analysis, tactical probing and light repartee”, Kissinger clearly saw in this combination an alter

ego of himself. And he detailed their meetings in the 2011 book OnChina, written “to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order, and its relationship to the more pragmatic, case-by-case American approach”, to quote its preface.

“The Chinese don’t think of negotiations as solving individual problems,” Kissinger said. “They think that every solution is an admission ticket for another problem. They think in terms of processes. … Hence Chinese diplomats consider continuity of relationships an important task and perhaps more important than formal documents. In this context, hospitality becomes an aspect of strategy.”

Here comes what Lord considers Kissinger’s biggest asset as a diplomat: his adaptability to the history and culture of his interlocutor. In OnChina, Kissinger, once described by his US army mentor Fritz Kraemer as “musically attuned to history”, expounded the thoughts of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist canonized by his work TheArtofWar.

“Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary,” Kissinger said, conceding that although negotiation is what keeps the threat of war “potential”, it is often viewed with suspicion because of its inbuilt “admission of finite power”.

Another place where Kissinger had tried to grasp the essence of what he dubbed Chinese realpolitik was in the board game go, or weiqi. In the game, invented in China more than 4,000 years ago, two protagonists try to defeat each other by encirclement, which Kissinger believes historically has been “the greatest strategic fear” for China, with its vast periphery.

“Chess produces single-mindedness, weiqi generates strategic flexibility,” said Kissinger, who shared the view with Nixon that moving to China was “not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends, to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us”. In other words, “maximum diplomatic flexibility”, as Kissinger called it.

In May 1972, three months after Nixon’s historic trip to China, the US president met his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, where two arms control agreements were signed. This was followed by the Berlin Agreement, put into force in June that year. Finally, on Jan 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, officially ending direct US involvement in the Vietnam War, which had cost the lives of more than 58,000 US soldiers. In the previous decade, the US, with the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), had fought the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), backed by the Soviet Union and China, in an effort to contain what it saw as the threat of spreading communism.

The meeting between Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong took place in the early afternoon of Feb 21, 1972, the first day after Nixon and his entourage arrived in Beijing and about seven months after Kissinger’s secret trip that resulted in a Chinese invitation for Nixon. The president brought with him Kissinger, who in turn brought Lord.

Observing that Mao “would almost invariably begin a conversation with a question” before proceeding to answer it “by means of a Socratic dialogue”, Kissinger was initially somewhat baffled by his “elliptical comments” and “abstruse language”. But he was quick to declare the man “Sun Tzu’s student” who thought strategically and pragmatically, with full recognition of “the need for priorities”.

“Mao suggested that each side develop a clear concept of its national interest and cooperate out of its own necessity,” recalled Kissinger, who throughout his diplomatic career “tried consistently to think in longrange terms and in the national interests, but in the national interests related to the national interests of other countries”.

“A sustainable outcome must be one that both sides have an interest in maintaining,” he said.

Mao’s tireless stressing of contradiction and disequilibrium as “a law of nature” had also struck a chord with Kissinger, whose 1954 doctoral dissertation Peace, Legitimacy and Equilibrium is widely seen as foreshadowing his activities on the international stage.

In the dissertation, published three years later as A World Restored: Metternich, Castle reagh Kissinger came up with two core concepts of his thinking as a political theorist: legitimacy and equilibrium, which he argued are inextricably linked to one another.

Legitimacy, equilibrium

“The outcome of their (the great powers’) interlocking ambitions and inhibitions would be equilibrium,” he wrote. “Legitimacy as used here should not be confused with justice. … An international order accepted by all of the major powers is ‘legitimate’ whereas an international order not accepted by one or more of the great powers is ‘revolutionary’ and hence dangerous.”

Such assertions have long fueled the charge that Kissinger was a power manipulator and a proponent of realpolitik for whom “equilibrium … is order. It amounts to justice,” to quote the French political scientist Stanley Hoffman.

“An amalgam of humanist concerns and realist calculations” was how Wu Xinbo, director at the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, put it. “Like most humanists, Kissinger is preoccupied with the question of war and peace. But instead of steeping himself in pure idealism, he charted a course through the tempestuous waters of international politics, where survival requires a mindfulness of the relative military and psychological strength of each party, as well as an understanding of their historical and domestic realities. When he emerged, he emerged with realistic answers.”

In 1972 Nixon’s China visit proved a huge success with the US public, whose pain induced by the Vietnam War was “eased and put into perspective by the dramatic opening to one-quarter of the world’s population”, Lord said.

Superman outfit-donning Kissinger blasted onto a June 1974 edition of Newsweek as Super K. The previous year, after calling Time’s managing editor in person to try unsuccessfully to pull himself off its cover, Kissinger appeared alongside Nixon in the magazine’s Jan 1, 1973, issue of co-men of the year.

The relationship is characterized by “wariness and co-dependence”, said Walter Isaacson, a former Time editor, in his 1992 book Kissing er: A Biography. Nixon, restive at the potential publicity Kissinger might generate for himself, had been “merciless in toying with him on the issue (of who would go to China)” in the days before the secret visit, Isaacson said.

In his 2016 interview with Lord, Kissinger conceded that “the final decision was always the president’s”, paying ultimate tribute to Nixon, who had never failed to back his tactical move as Kissinger bestrode the world stage dealing with everyone from Israel’s Golda Meir to Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad.

“One more Middle East swing like this and I’ll be aged,” Kissinger told Zhou Enlai during a later meeting, referring to his mediating efforts undertaken upon the outbreak on Oct 6, 1973, of the Yom Kippur War, fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria.

“The shuttle diplomacy”, as it was called, went on for about a year, during which Valeriani, the veteran journalist who was never sitting too far behind Kissinger on the plane, watched as Kissinger “grew in girth as well as in stature, eating when he was nervous, nervous when he was negotiating and negotiating all the time”.

The apparent weight gain meant that Kissinger’s hiking on the Fragrant Mountains of Beijing during his October 1975 visit “was all downhill”, Valeriani said. On the same visit Kissinger, who brought with him his second wife Nancy Maginnes, also met Mao for the fifth and final time. The chairman, aging and in poor health, looked up at Maginnes and down at Kissinger with an exaggerated gesture, playing the comic as he noted the big difference in their heights.

During their first meeting in 1972, Mao impressed Kissinger as having “the quality of being at the center of wherever he stood”, to use the latter’s words. Despite the physical condition that rendered Mao’s speech slurred, making him reliant on a translator, the Chinese leader would pull it off again.

“It’s always extraordinary to me how much Mao is on top of things,” Kissinger, who some believe had tried to cultivate in himself the same aura he saw in world leaders including Mao, later marveled. “For example, he knew the entire content of the talk I had had the previous night with Teng (Deng Xiaoping) in great detail. There’s no way they could have done this orally. He had to have read it. So, you know, he’s still very much there.”

In the ensuing years many more times Kissinger would meet Deng, who, not long after Mao died, assumed the country’s leadership and oversaw the establishment of formal US-China diplomatic ties in 1979. He would return again and again to exchange views with successive generations of Chinese leaders willing to seek his counsel. He traveled to China more than 100 times, the last trip in July, during which he was received by President Xi Jinping.

During a visit in 2013, Kissinger sat down to talk with students at the Center for American Studies of Fudan University in an event that Wu hosted. When a student joked that his name sounded like “kiss-girl”, the 90-year-old answered by saying that “power is an aphrodisiac”, a saying of Napoleon Bonaparte that Kissinger had earlier popularized through paraphrasing.

Commenting on the fact that at the height of his power, Kissinger was often seen with beautiful women including Hollywood stars and socialites, Lord, who attended Kissinger’s 1974 wedding with Maginnes, said that the former long-time aide to the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was “really the only person he liked (in those days)”.

“It was all publicity and part of building a mystique,” Lord said, recalling Kissinger “taking an attractive journalist to dinner in a Paris restaurant”, right after one of his secret talks with Le Duc Thos, his North Vietnamese counterpart with whom he negotiated the Paris Accords.

Both men were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, and two Nobel committee members resigned in protest on the grounds that Kissinger had ordered the bombing of Hanoi during the cease-fire negotiations. While Le Duc Thos declined the award, Kissinger offered to return it after Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the capital of South Vietnam at the time, was captured by North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975.

Lord, alluding to the intense controversy surrounding his mentor, “a complex, flawed personality”, said, citing the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

“Kissinger had a picture of a gorilla in his office, with a caption directed to his staff that roughly went: ‘If I want your views on something, I’ll beat them out of you’.”

Lord said that in his speechwriting days for Kissinger he was routinely pushed by the latter to revise his writing to the sixth draft. Once, to test whether Kissinger had read his submissions carefully, Lord inserted in the middle of his report on Cambodia a sentence consisting of the titles of several Kissinger books. The boss, a prolific writer of heavy and intellectually hefty tomes, duly spotted it.

According to Ferguson, Kissinger stopped talking to him for three months after reading the draft of his 2015 biography, which covered Kissinger’s years up to the eve of his appointment by Nixon as his national security adviser in January 1969.

“He felt that the book was too revealing,” Ferguson said.

In July 1972, after the US chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer threatened to walk out on the symbolic world championship chess match with the titleholder Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union, Kissinger rang Fischer to persuade him to go. Kissinger, “a serious chess player in his youth”, according to Ferguson, would open the conversation by saying that “this is the worst chess player in the world calling the best one”.

About that time, he refused to play chess with the Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin, who called him “the only person who had learned to eat caviar with chopsticks”, because “that would reveal too much about my personality and psychology”, Ferguson quoted Kissinger as saying.

In his book, Ferguson, who sees “a pattern of empathy” in his subject, tells how the young man, in defeated Germany as a US army intelligence officer with power over enemy civilians, refused simply to stand together with his parents “on the vengeful side”, as Kissinger put it.

“To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between,” Kissinger wrote to his parents in July 1948. “Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.”

This was despite his strong attachment to his parents, especially his mother, whom he forbade to cry upon his inauguration as the first Jewish US secretary of state on Sept 23, 1973, and whom he thanked, on her 90th birthday, for “everything I have achieved”.

“Kissinger’s single greatest achievement, I would say, was holding this country together in the wake of the Watergate scandal,” said Lord, who was US ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989. “Almost single-handedly and by the sheer force of his personality he helped to maintain American posture and to ensure the continuity of its foreign policy.”

Balance of power

Yet Kissinger, who met every prominent US and international leader after he stepped down as secretary of state in December 1976, was never invited back to office. His apparent exile, according to Wu of the Center for American Studies, was in large part because of strong opposition from neoconservatives who prefer US geopolitical primacy to the balance of power that Kissinger championed.

“Kissinger had decided that a balance of power favorable to the US would best serve its interests,” said Wu.

“Chess is about the decisive battle, weiqi is about the protracted campaign,” Kissinger wrote in OnChina. “The chess player aims for total victory, the weiqi player seeks relative advantage.”

A balance of power “is incompatible with the assertion of absolute values”, he said, and “the United States must temper its missionary spirit with a concept of duty to the world”.

“When the Sino-US rapprochement started, neither of us had any illusion of changing the basic convictions of the other. It was precisely the absence of any such illusion that facilitated our dialogue. … The most significant contribution of the leaders of the time was their willingness to raise their sights beyond the immediate issues of the day. In a way, they were fortunate their long isolation from each other meant that there were no short-term day-to-day issues between them.”

Kissinger envisioned the US and China generating “a sense of common purpose” in the form of the “coevolution of two societies progressing on parallel, though not identical, tracks”.

“A Cold War between the two countries would arrest progress for a generation on both sides of the Pacific. … The United States and China owe it to their people and to global well-being to make the attempt (to avoid it).

“In the end, history lauds not conflicts of societies but their reconciliations.”

ZHANG TIANZHU / FOR CHINA DAILY Henry Kissinger visits the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, on June 29, 2013.

PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY From left: Kissinger with top aide Winston Lord (second from left) on their way to Paris for peace talks to end the Vietnam War in January 1973; Kissinger with his biographer Niall Ferguson; Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, talks with Kissinger.

Top: Kissinger plays table tennis during a break from negotiating the text of the Shanghai Communique during his October 1971 visit to Beijing.

XINHUA PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY; Above: Kissinger waves a table tennis bat at the reception of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries on March 18, 2001.

PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY The historic meeting between US president Richard Nixon (fourth from right) and Chairman Mao Zedong (third from left) on Feb 21, 1972. They are flanked by, from left, Premier Zhou Enlai, interpreter Tang Wensheng, Kissinger, Winston Lord and Wang Hairong.