The lessons from my 40-year conversation with Kissinger
Henry A. Kissinger's life ranged across every octave. He was arguably the greatest statesman of his age, but he could be a manipulator, too. He was a global leader in his own right, but he was sometimes a courtier to the wealthy and powerful. He had rare intellectual gifts, but he could be surprisingly insecure.
The one constant with Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100, was that he was always interesting. He was a charmer and a flatterer to people he liked or thought could do him some good (or harm). You would think someone so famous wouldn't care what journalists wrote about him, but he did, almost obsessively. He was very funny in conversation, with a dry and sometimes wickedly mean sense of humor.
Journalists often see more of our subjects than we let on. We glimpse the points of personal vanity, the insecurities, the things that people want to hide even as they advertise their opinions. That was my experience with Kissinger, with whom I talked many dozens of times, concluding with a startling conversation about artificial intelligence.
My first interview with the former secretary of state was nearly 40 years ago, for a long article in the Wall Street Journal pegged to the 10th anniversary of the United States' defeat in Vietnam. He was peeved at the topic but entirely unrepentant about his role in a conflict for which his critics had branded him a “war criminal.”
A big lesson of the war for him, Kissinger said, was that the United States should have bombed Hanoi and Haiphong earlier. “We are to be blamed for not doing in 1969 what we did in 1972,” he argued. “You do not have the choice to lose with moderation. If you use power, you must prevail.”
Kissinger's chroniclers discovered long ago that there is a kind of Rosetta Stone to decode his thinking in his 1954 Harvard doctoral dissertation. It was published three years later with the title “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822.” He planned it as the first volume in a trilogy that would extend to the breakdown of the European order in World War I, but he abandoned the larger project as he became an apprentice to the foreign policy elite.
It was an odd dissertation, with no primary research, few footnotes and a style that was closer to extended historical essay than academic paper. It's an astonishing piece of writing and thinking that explains many of Kissinger's later policies.
Kissinger's subject was the diplomacy that surrounded the 1815 Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic Wars and brought nearly a century of relative peace to Europe. It was the story, in Kissinger's telling, of how the status quo powers of the time (Britain and Austria-hungary) found a way to contain the rising powers — post-revolutionary France and Germany.
The hero of the book was the Austrian foreign minister, Count Klemens von Metternich. Though Kissinger denied it later, Metternich seems a model for what the young graduate student became. Kissinger's descriptions of Metternich are acute: “His genius was instrumental, not creative; he excelled at manipulation, not construction. … He preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack.”
Metternich's triumph was that he created an architecture for stability that endured for decades. That was Kissinger's aim throughout his diplomatic career. His primary challenge was to check an expansive, post-revolutionary Soviet Union. He did that through a lattice of arms-control negotiations and personal diplomacy that came to be known as “détente.” To help check the Soviets, he orchestrated the famous opening to China that culminated in President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing.
Kissinger's diplomacy, like Metternich's, was avowedly amoral. Stability was a goal in itself. Realism about national interest was the policymaker's only reliable guide; idealism created more trouble than it solved. He feared, for instance, that overemphasis on peace could actually benefit warmakers, writing in the book's second paragraph: “Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective … the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member.”
Kissinger explained his passion for stability to a Harvard colleague by invoking Goethe: “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter,” according to a biography of Kissinger by Walter Isaacson. That's the kind of lacerating realpolitik that made Kissinger a target for so many analysts.
Kissinger had a lifelong preoccupation with the Middle East. And it's useful now, when war between Israel and Hamas is ravaging the region, to understand Kissinger's perspective.