Kissinger: 1923‑1968: The Idealist

It’s hard to see how any biographer can quote a Kissinger memo to then White House assistant McGeorge Bundy expressing his indignation that “personal competiveness” is undermining the administration’s handling of the 1961 Berlin crisis with a straight face, since his main complaint is that he’s being shut out.

If you ask almost any leftist of a certain vintage, he’s plainly destined to end up sharing a lake of fire with Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. Always thorough, often surprising, at times deeply moving, this is an extraordinary biography of the most significant scholar-statesman-strategist of our time, by one of our most accomplished historians. Volume I. Buy Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist Reprint by Ferguson, Niall (ISBN: 9780143109754) from Amazon's Book Store. Ferguson goes into this theory in great detail, disproving it on several grounds, but especially for its lack of even the most basic actual or circumstantial evidence. If you’re going to set up as a wizard, convincing everyone to ignore the man (let alone the onetime adolescent refugee) behind the green curtain is pretty much an imperative.Naturally, that only makes Ferguson’s detailed account of Kissinger’s early years more absorbing. He always had to be the suave global architect and the bustling fireman rolled into one, even in parts of the world he’d serenely ignored until a crisis attracted his ambition.People who opposed the Vietnam War will always abhor him for his part in prolonging the conflict for five punishing years and wrecking Cambodia in the bargain. In the mid-Sixties, when he paid frequent visits to South Vietnam to inspect areas close to the fighting, he quietly challenged the prudence of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. (Kissinger wouldn’t become a full professor until 1962.) Kissinger was not a cold-minded political scientist, we are told, but a lifelong idealist. This book contains the first full account of the abortive initiative to start talks with Hanoi in 1967; as Ferguson puts it, “to an extent never previously recognized by scholars,” Kissinger attempted “to broker some kind of peace agreement with the North Vietnamese, using a variety of indirect channels of communication to Hanoi that passed through not only Paris but also Moscow.”Yet it is in Ferguson’s comprehensive demolition of the revisionist accounts of the 1968 election by Seymour Hersh, Christopher Hitchens and others that this book will be seen as controversial. Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist. (It turns out that one of the reasons Kissinger was in Paris in 1967 was that he was secretly going to the Sorbonne to woo the only great love of his life, Nancy Maginnes, whom he subsequently married. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this magisterial two-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding.Terry L. Anderson has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1998 and is currently the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow.From Lt. General H.R. Since Ferguson teaches there himself, he’s at once effusive and defensive about the place, including the hilariously prim remark that Yale really did most of the “dirty work” in the Ivy League’s labyrinthine Cold War collaborations with Washington, back before Vietnam made complicity anathema. For big, bold and compelling, it is impossible to ignore Kissinger - 1923-1968: the idealist (Allen Lane), the first volume of Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger, which asks us to reconsider America's best-known "realist" as more Kantian than Machiavellian, more Castlereagh than Meternich, at least up to 1968, when President Nixon first granted the Harvard academic high office. Although he went to a Jewish school in Washington Heights, he already felt the tug of ambition that would take him away from this milieu. Not much about his soccer-loving, not especially studious German boyhood seems to mark him out for future distinction, but the Nazis’ race laws more or less take that decision out of his hands. Even to a naysayer like me, the gamesmanship involved in reconfiguring our relationship to the USSR by cozying up to what Americans still called Red China was probably Kissinger at his best; there’s a reason why “Nixon goes to China” is still shorthand for a political masterstroke, after all. Objectivity is plainly a non-starter here, as Kissinger not only cooperated with the project but solicited Ferguson to take it on — and we all know that Henry isn’t much of a “Paint me warts and all” guy. He’d have been a less plausible negotiator between the Arabs and the Israelis if he hadn’t successfully downplayed being Jewish as irrelevant. 2015. Born Heinz Kissinger in Bavaria, he and his family were subject to increasingly draconian official anti-Semitism once Hitler came to power; they got to America mere months before 1938’s At least some of the time, Kissinger had good reasons to maintain that his background played no part in shaping his worldview.

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