Today, everyone and his brother will be writing about Henry Kissinger. I had several encounters with him, in various cities at various tables. I will write about those some other time. I thought I would make a contribution where Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize was concerned. He shared the prize with Le Duc Tho in 1973. (The North Vietnamese envoy refused his half, the only man in history ever to turn down the peace prize.) This is the most controversial Nobel prize, in any field, ever awarded.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the award to Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their negotiation of the Paris Agreement in January 1973. (Kissinger was Nixon’s national security adviser at the time; he would be secretary of state by the time the Nobel prize was announced.) This agreement was a ceasefire in the Vietnam War. The war had been long and bloody, of course, and the chairman of the Nobel committee, Aase Lionæs, said that “news of the Paris Agreement brought a wave of joy and hope to the entire world.” She said that the committee hoped the parties would “feel a moral responsibility” to see the agreement through.
They did not, or at least one party did not, and the 1973 award — whether for right or wrong reasons — lives in a degree of infamy.
I wrote about this award — and more than a hundred others — in a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, Peace, They Say. I will draw, in my post here, from the relevant chapter.
Kissinger, according to his memoirs, was quite surprised at news of his Nobel: “I had not even known that I was a candidate.” He was, of course, moved to receive the prize, for there is “no comparable honor” (in his words). Yet he felt queasy. He knew that the Paris Agreement was a house of cards. “I would have been far happier with recognition for a less precarious achievement. Without false modesty, I am prouder of what I accomplished in the next two years in the Middle East.”
Here, Kissinger is referring to his well-known “shuttle diplomacy.”
Moreover, there was the problem of Nixon, the president under whom he was serving. Kissinger says that Nixon had “set his heart” on the Nobel prize. And to see his secretary of state win it instead must have been “painful.” The recognition that Nixon most longed for, according to Kissinger, was recognition as a peacemaker. “Only those who knew Nixon well could perceive beneath the gallant congratulations” something amiss: a “hurt that I was being given all the credit for actions that had cost him so much.”
Kissinger’s share of the prize (i.e., half) was worth about $65,000, and he used it to set up a scholarship fund for the children of fallen or missing servicemen. He named the fund after his parents.
His co-laureate turned down the prize on the strange grounds that the Paris Agreement was not being implemented. Kissinger puts it very well when he says that this was “another insolence” on the part of North Vietnam: Its violations had, in fact, turned the agreement into a “farce.”
Around the Western world, reaction to the 1973 award was fierce, scornful, and bitter. Reaction in the Nobel committee itself was not exactly happy. Two of the five members resigned. Representing a fair chunk of establishment opinion, the New York Times said that 1973’s was “the Nobel War Prize.”
Kissinger opted against going to Oslo, because mass demonstrations were planned, and he was loath to add fuel to the fire. He seized on a pretext: The life of a secretary of state is so busy. He tells us, in those memoirs, that the Norwegian government “seemed relieved.” He sent a message, a kind of acceptance speech, to be read by the U.S. ambassador there, Thomas Byrne. The ambassador ducked into a rear entrance, to avoid snowballs and such.
Kissinger’s message was, in part, a meditation on peace and its difficulties. He quoted from a Nobel address known to a great many Americans: the one given by a literature laureate, William Faulkner, in 1950. Faulkner said, “I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail.” Kissinger said, “We live today in a world so complex that even only to endure, man must prevail — over an accelerating technology that threatens to escape his control and over the habits of conflict that have obscured his peaceful nature.”
Aase Lionæs, for her part, gave a very carefully written and reasoned presentation speech, in defense of this most controversial of awards. She said that, in making its decision, the committee was “fully aware that a ceasefire and not a peace agreement was involved.” They “realized that peace has not yet come to Vietnam, and that the sufferings of the population of Vietnam are not at an end.” But they wanted to honor the effort, and strengthen the chances for real peace.
Mrs. Lionæs remembered the 1950 laureate, Ralph Bunche. The general armistice that he had negotiated between Israel and its enemies was shot to hell, in a succession of wars — the latest of which had occurred only two months before. (This was the Yom Kippur War.) But the committee felt no shame at honoring the effort.
Everyone says that the 1973 award is the “most unpopular” Nobel award ever, and that is probably true. But the nature of the unpopularity is worth pondering. The critics mainly objected to the half of the prize going to Kissinger, not the half going to Le Duc Tho. They thought it outrageous that the American secretary of state had won the Nobel prize, not so much that the representative of a totalitarian and mass-murdering dictatorship had done so.
It is legend that Tom Lehrer, the American musician-satirist, gave up his career after Kissinger won the peace prize. That is not true: He had bowed out before. But he did say that “political satire became obsolete” when Kissinger won.
As the Bunche-mediated armistice was shot to hell, so was the Paris Agreement: North Vietnam conquered the South in April 1975, uniting the halves under Communism. Kissinger wrote to Mrs. Lionæs, returning his gold medal, his diploma, and the money. He said he felt “honor bound” to do this. “I regret, more profoundly than I can ever express, the necessity for this letter. But the anguish and tragedy that have been inflicted upon millions who sought nothing more than the chance to live their own lives leave me no alternative.”
The committee would not accept Kissinger’s gesture (or medal, or diploma, or cash): The Nobel Peace Prize is not returnable. The committee explained that events in Vietnam in no way reduced their “appreciation of Mr. Kissinger’s sincere efforts to get a ceasefire agreement put into force in 1973.”
So, this is only one episode in Henry A. Kissinger’s long and crowded life. But it is an interesting, and poignant, one.