Born and raised in Bavaria, 15-year-old Henry Kissinger and his family arrived in the United States in 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler came to power, one year before Hitler plunged Europe into war. One of the best recent books on Kissinger, Barry Gewen’s intellectual biography, is entitled “The Inevitability of Tragedy.” Turmoil was Kissinger’s, and his generation’s, birthright. Studying it, managing it, trying to tamp it down, became his life’s work. Avoiding it, he knew, was an impossibility.
On the faculty at Harvard, the perch to which his brains and industry brought him, Kissinger was a Cold War liberal, of a “realist” bent (his doctoral dissertation had been on Metternich). But he also invited WFB to address his classes. This was from respect for WFB’s talents and, soon, gratitude for his friendship. But it was also astute politics: One never knew when a friend on the right might be useful. WFB indeed helped introduce Kissinger to Richard Nixon’s circle.
His record as Nixon’s national-security adviser, then secretary of state, is the foreign-policy record of the Nixon administration. Nixon, intelligent and experienced, set his own course. But Kissinger approved, implemented, and, in professorial media turns, publicized it. The tilt to Pakistan, the opening to China, the Yom Kippur War and shuttle diplomacy, toppling Allende, Vietnam peace talks — all bore Kissinger’s fingerprints. Kissinger’s reading of the Cold War’s power balance and of America’s capabilities was meliorist, and struck conservatives as defeatist. (WFB’s NR columns on Nixon’s trip to China were savage.) Kissinger thought he was doing the best in a bad world.
Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in the GOP changed the party’s, and the country’s, attitude. Reagan’s view of the Cold War, as he told an associate early on, was, “We win and they lose.” But Kissinger kept his hand in, as an adviser and commentator — in Washington lingo, a wise man. One of his latest pieces of advice was among his least wise: He was a lifelong advocate for engagement with Communist China. He profited as a consultant, but the more important motive was pride: He could not bear to see his historic opening becoming a dead end. That was a tragedy he could not face.
When WFB retired as editor in chief of NR, Kissinger offered to throw him a dinner at his East Side river-view apartment. You make the guest list, he said. WFB invited all his youngest colleagues to hear the wise man’s tour d’horizon. Two affectionate gestures, two of many.
Dead at 100. R.I.P.