Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership. Winston Lord. New York, NY: All Points Books, 2019.
Winston Lord, the former American ambassador to China and a distinguished American diplomat, begins this short and engaging book by pointing out that Henry Kissinger has never done an oral history. Given that Kissinger has written over 4000 pages of memoirs and sat for thousands of interviews with journalists, the absence of a simple and direct oral history surprised Lord. Yet it gave him and his collaborator, former Deputy National Security Adviser in the Trump Administration K. T. McFarland, an opportunity to contribute to the historical record. Kissinger on Kissinger is the result of their efforts, a largely uncritical account of the diplomacy of the most famous—and controversial—American diplomat of the 20th century.
Kissinger on Kissinger could also be entitled, “Kissinger as he wants to be remembered.” In the brief introduction he provides to the book, the 96 year-old Kissinger writes—with colossal understatement—that “I did not go out of my way to be self-critical.”
Covering his years as Nixon’s National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, this work emphasizes his best-known foreign policy initiatives as the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, and the “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East. Lord and McFarland ask sympathetic questions about Kissinger’s role in these policies, and Kissinger expresses his belief that the Administration proceeded from a “strategic blueprint,” which allowed them to move beyond simply responding piecemeal to events and crises. (This comment obviously alludes to more recent Administrations.) Nixon and Kissinger sought to achieve a new balance of power bringing a more peaceful world while still defending America’s interests and values. Their “triangular diplomacy,” exploiting the tensions between the Soviet Union and China, effectively countered Soviet gains, and in the long run, may have proved decisive in America’s overall triumph in the Cold War.
In dealing with one of the less successful aspects of his diplomacy, Kissinger defends his conduct of the negotiations that brought an end to the American role in the war in Vietnam. Had Congress not undermined the 1973 Paris peace agreement by cutting economic aid and forbidding any military reaction to North Vietnam’s continuing aggression, he insists, South Vietnam would have had a “genuine opportunity to survive.”[1] Kissinger makes a point that resonates today when he asserts, “The idea of conducting foreign policy on behalf of American credibility is now conventionally ridiculed. But it was one of the key elements of the Vietnamese war, because potential allies, actual allies, threatened countries were bound to assess their future in terms of the American performance in Vietnam.”[2] In the wake of the Trump Administration’s on-again-off-again strikes against Iran and debates about whether to withdraw or stay in Afghanistan, Kissinger’s argument for the significance of credibility in international affairs should be taken seriously.
In our era of Twitter diplomacy, recurrent trade wars, bitter disputes with allies, and presidential love affairs with North Korean dictators, it is easy to become nostalgic for Kissinger’s “strategic blueprint,” his brand of cautious realism, and his calls for the “indispensability of American leadership” in international affairs. Both Lord and McFarland place the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy on a pedestal, regarding it as “the standard by which all subsequent administrations have been measured.”[3] Throughout the book, their questions are polite, friendly, and non-confrontational. Kissinger, who praised Lord’s service within his National Security Council and even referred to him as his “conscience” in his memoirs, returns the personal warmth toward both interviewers, but especially Lord. Frequently he makes a point of emphasizing that Lord did not resign after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, as three of his other National Security Council assistants did. Lord’s loyalty and willingness to stay with Kissinger afforded him the opportunity to accompany his boss on his secret trip to China, his negotiations in Moscow, and the Paris Peace talks with North Vietnam. Lord jokingly remarks this book allowed him to set forth his reflections on his “mentor and tormentor,” and Lord himself has done a lengthy oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training that more fully brings out his involvement with Kissinger’s diplomacy as well as some of his disagreements with Kissinger.[4] Nevertheless, Kissinger on Kissinger makes it clear that their friendship has endured over five decades.
National security adviser Henry Kissinger and Hanoi's Lo Duc Tho shake hands following their January 23, 1973, meeting at the Paris Peace Talks. (UPI)
Kissinger was one of the first dignitaries to meet with President-elect Donald Trump after his November 2016 victory, and he has been careful in his comments about the Administration in which McFarland served. Nevertheless, it is hard not to read Kissinger’s comments in the book as anything but a critique of “America First.” He explained, for example, that “[w]hat I have tried consistently to do is to think in long-range terms and in the national interest, but in the national interest related to the national interests of other countries. Because if you assert only your interests, without linking them to the interests of others, you will not be able to sustain your efforts.”[5]
There also is a tone throughout the book of regret for how foreign policy and national issues have become so polarized and embittered. Although the Nixon era is not generally remembered for good relations between the president and the press, Kissinger expresses regret that Washington today does not allow for the “backgrounders,” the briefings to reporters he would provide, which were like “a Harvard seminar.”[6] He similarly laments the loss of the old Washington’s social scene, associated with figures like the columnist Joe Alsop or Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, that allowed for Republicans and Democrats to hash out their problems over weekend dinner parties.
It would be churlish to be overly critical of a book that conveys important lessons about the making of foreign policy as well as nostalgia for a time when Washington actually seemed to get things done. In getting Kissinger to sit for an oral history, Lord and McFarland have made a real contribution to understanding his diplomacy and world politics. Lord has also been exceedingly generous with his own time in helping scholars, including this reviewer, understand the history of this complicated era.
Still, it is worth noting that Henry Kissinger is a complex and complicated man, a figure whose brilliance could often be undermined by his own arrogance and quest for power. Hans Morgenthau—the great analyst of international relations often seen as the father of realism in foreign policy—once described Kissinger with the Greek word, polytropos, “many sided” or “of many appearances.”[7] Morgenthau used the term to explain Kissinger’s skills as a negotiator and mediator in the Middle East, with his ability to convince all sides that he had their interests at heart. But it could also be used to recognize the many different Henry Kissingers, not all of whom are as admirable as the one captured in this book. Kissinger’s judgment could be flawed and influenced by factors other than the national interest, including domestic political considerations, personal ambition, bureaucratic politics, and simple expediency. The book does not address the Nixon Administration’s efforts to undermine the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, or the decision to support Pakistan both in its brutal suppression of what became Bangladesh and in its war with India.[8] Cambodia, though a far more complicated issue than most critics of Kissinger suggest, also is barely mentioned.[9] Likewise, how the disclosure of the bombing of Cambodia resulted in the wiretapping of various NSC officials and journalists, including Lord himself, is not discussed.[10]
The irony is that Kissinger himself has often written of the tragic nature of statecraft and the complex moral tradeoffs that require leaders to choose between the lesser of evils. Unfortunately, this aspect of his career is missing from the book, and what emerges is a much-sanitized history of the Nixon and Kissinger years, or diplomacy without the sausage making, to paraphrase Bismarck’s famous aphorism.
Kissinger’s oral history should be tested against other primary sources and materials. Most importantly, Kissinger did have important disagreements with Nixon. He was exceedingly careful in how he expressed these during the first years of the Administration, although after Nixon was crippled by Watergate, Kissinger became more assertive. It seems clear, for example, that Kissinger wanted, in his words, to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East and secure America’s undisputed role as mediator and hegemon for the region. By contrast, there is substantial evidence Nixon sought to work with the Soviets to impose a superpower settlement on Israel and the Arab states. In a similar vein, the book drastically understates the intense bureaucratic conflict that Kissinger engaged in with Secretary of State William Rogers. It also minimizes the State Department’s important role in correcting the Shanghai Communique to help preserve Taiwan’s autonomy. The Kissinger-Rogers conflicts were legendary, but they are largely airbrushed out of this account. Finally, on Vietnam, Kissinger did have his differences with Nixon, including whether to mine Haiphong’s harbors before the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks summit with the Soviets in Moscow. Despite his concerns about America’s credibility in Vietnam, Kissinger valued a potential nuclear arms agreement more than the survival of Vietnam, a judgment most Americans at the time likely shared. Kissinger also understates his pessimism about Saigon’s survival after the Paris Peace treaty, forgetting he forecast privately that the regime would likely survive 18 months. Allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South—even with an unenforceable ban on their resupply—reflected the Administration’s acceptance of Saigon’s eventual fate.[11]
Former Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger speaks at the Vietnam War Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, April 26, 2016. (Nick Ut/AP)
In his defense, Kissinger recognized most Americans had washed their hands of South Vietnam as soon as the American Prisoners-of-war returned, and any effort to save the South Vietnamese state faced significant hurdles. The Congressional actions toward South Vietnam reflected a broad consensus of public opinion, and Kissinger well understood this. The attempt to shift responsibility to Congress for the failure in Vietnam, however, does not speak well for Kissinger’s legacy.
Read with these caveats and qualifications in mind, Kissinger on Kissinger is a thoughtful and insightful account of some of the most successful American diplomatic achievements of the 20th century, carried out by its most accomplished practitioner of diplomacy. The book provides an important look into Kissinger’s legacy, although it is only one part of the polytropos that is Henry Kissinger.
Thomas Alan Schwartz is a Professor of History and Political Science at Vanderbilt University.He is the author of Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam, and numerous articles and reviews on recent American foreign relations.
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Header Image: Henry Kissinger (History.com)
Notes:
[1] Winston Lord, Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership (New York, NY: All Points Books, 2019), 83.
[2] Ibid., 87.
[3] Ibid., xvii
[4] Lord’s more than 800 page oral history can be found at https://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Lord,%20Winston.pdf
[5] Winston Lord, Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership (New York, NY: All Points Books, 2019), 129.
[6] Ibid., 127.
[7] Hans Morgenthau, “Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State: an Evaluation,” Encounter, Vol. 43, (Nov.1974), p. 57.
[8] Two important works are Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File. (New York: New Press, 2003), Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2013).
[9] The classic work is William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
[10] Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 83ff.
[11] I cover these issues in my forthcoming, Henry Kissinger and American Power (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2020).