Henry Kissinger and the man who wanted to confront him
2023-12-01 00:27:39
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon, died at the age of 100 this week.
Born in Germany, Kissinger became a U.
S citizen in 1943, at the age of 20. He would serve his adopted country for decades to come, leaving an immense and at times controversial footprint on U.s foreign policy.
One of the most famous and powerful diplomats of the 20th century. Some will remember him for his Nobel Peace Prize for his role negotiating the end of the Vietnam war. For others, he was nothing more than an unconvicted war criminal.
So what is the legacy of Henry Kissinger? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.
I had an opportunity once to confront him, I flunked it.
That's Michael Goldfarb, an author, journalist and host of the podcast First Rough Draft of History, and a longtime correspondent for America's National Public Radio.
One afternoon in the very late 1970s, I was walking down 52nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan, around the corner from the Four seasons restaurant.
He's reading there from a post he wrote on Thursday morning after hearing the news of the death of Henry Kissinger.
And who do I see Jaywalking briskly in the middle of the block with a companion? But Henry Kissinger, smiling, clearly well-lunched? He is heading to my side of the street and next thing I know we're walking side by side. There are no bodyguards, just Kissinger and his lunch companion.
I could have at the very least punched him, I did not. It's either a mark of how civilized I am or how cowardly that I did not.
MICHAEL A long time ago, but a strong memory. Explain to us why you did want to punch Henry Kissinger.
Because of all the public figures attached to the American government in my lifetime, there's no one whose effect on the world has been as bloody and baleful as Henry Kissinger. He remained at the pinnacle of power in America, in fact, for only a decade. And yet his worldview, his idea that you have to balance power, you know that there would be an alternate source of power to America. In his time, it was the Soviet Union allowed you to make all manner of decisions about keeping the balances between other countries and Soviet affected countries.
And to do this, if blood had to be shed, then so be it. And Jonathan, we're talking tens of thousands dead because of policy decisions made by this man.
And yet by the time of his death, and in fact, even in the last few decades, he was fated as this great foreign policy sage. I mean, there is this division between people who think he was one of the most consequential foreign policy thinkers, diplomats of the last century. And you only have to look at some of the tributes from world leaders today. And then those on the other hand, who see him as a kind of monster, as a war criminal. Famously one of your contemporaries, I think Christopher Hitchens wrote that he, you know, the trial of Henry Kissinger, believed he should have been tried as a war criminal. So huge divisions on him even now.
Let's go back a bit to the start of his life, because every part of his life was fascinating. Every part of his life, in a way, spanned the most dramatic events of the last century. But Kissinger's childhood, his roots, perhaps not universally known, are especially fascinating, so tell us about the beginning of his life.
At the beginning, I mean. Henry Kissinger was born in Germany before World War II and grew up with the kinds of anti-semitism you can imagine in Germany in the 1930s. He and his family, his immediate family, made it to America, made it to New York, lived up in Washington Heights, lost multiple members of his family left behind in the Holocaust. He had initially gone to City College of New York, which was a free university in New York in those days, and he was studying accountancy. But then the war intervened, he joined the army and then got a second chance at higher education and ended up in Harvard. And it was here at Harvard that he really began to show the essential nature that brought him to the heights of power.
And in between there, he does wear the uniform of his new country, the United States in the Second World War gets drafted. And in a way. That is the beginning of, well, you could say, his foreign policy career, but it's also it is the beginnings of a career of a sort in intelligence. Just tell us about his wartime service.
He was inducted into the army, and, in fact, this is where his career begins, as being the world's most successful apprentice. He managed to apprentice himself to more powerful men and found himself rising through the chain of command of the 84th Infantry Division. He was on the intelligence staff, he was in action. At the Battle of the Bulge. Won a bronze star, not for combat gallantry, it should be said, but for his value as an intelligence worker tracking down Gestapo officers.
As you say he, then later on, he's at Harvard, has this sort of academic career. But even as he is attaching himself to rising stars, that will take him the corridors of power in Washington. But just one note on Harvard, which I think is interesting, which is this dissertation he wrote, and you took the time to read it and analyze it? He called it a world restored. It's partly because Kissinger's foreign policy thinking would become a huge part of his legend that would endure for centuries. Him not just as a practitioner of foreign policy, but almost as a theorist.
What did you learn from his university dissertation that he wrote as now so many decades ago at Harvard?
Well, he wrote this dissertation, A world restored on the Congress of Vienna, Napoleon is defeated, and the great powers of Europe decide to redraw the map of Europe. Well, what did they do? They partitioned Poland, Russia got half of Poland.
They did other things to impose their will on the map, and this essentially is how Kissinger saw the force of history. That great men sitting around a table could redraw maps as they chose, and because they couldn't force the map with a bit of military power. And the people who lived below on the street had really no say in the matter. He was able to work his way up the food chain in Washington because he was talking about great men.
It sounds like you're describing the world's most successful suck-up, but you described him as the great apprentice. And in a way, he gets close to the man who would become the most powerful man in the world in the form of Richard Nixon. And that's really where the key years of him, where his power was at its highest. How did Henry Kissinger, only an immigrant into the country a matter of years earlier, get so close to President Nixon?
And just looking at it the other way around, what did Nixon see in him?
Richard Nixon was a profoundly insecure man for someone who achieved the greatest power you can achieve in America, and with great struggle. Remember, he lost to John F. Kennedy, he lost the governorship in California.
And yet, eight years later, found himself elected president. He was deeply insecure. But I think that they saw the world in the same way. You have to understand. 1968 Kissinger was working in the White House for Lyndon Johnson.
Good evening my fellow Americans. Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
And he resigned dramatically on television and said he would spend the rest of his time in office seeking peace, and indeed, he did. He opened up a channel of communication with the North Vietnamese to talk about the possibility of a ceasefire and perhaps negotiating an end to the war. Kissinger was working in the White House at that point for Lyndon Johnson. But I think he had already decided that Richard Nixon was the man who could actually bring the war to an end, but on America's terms.
So he contacted the Nixon people and said, Look, this is happening and I think you should know about it. And Nixon, in fact, organized his own back channel to South Vietnam. To say whatever is going on and whatever is being negotiated by Johnson, don't let it happen, because if I become president, I'll negotiate you a better deal. And in fact, that's what happened. The South Vietnamese pulled out at the last minute in October and scuppered Johnson's ability to declare that there was a ceasefire and peace would follow, and Nixon was elected president.
And he brought Kissinger into the White House as the national security advisor. Kissinger had a way of getting into his mind and speaking the words that he was thinking, but hadn't spoken aloud yet. And I think that was the essence of their dynamic.
And it becomes an amazing relationship. We'll talk a bit about how they're together. In the very final days of the Nixon, White House famously said they were on their knees, praying together. We'll talk about that in a moment, but just on the main project. That would sort of bind them together and define the way Kissinger was seen. And that is this business of the Vietnam War.
You've explained how, in a way, there was a breakthrough, even before Nixon took office. But the thing that would dominate their work together was the manner of ending the war and the violence by which it ended. It's in that area that Kissinger's accusers would really concentrate, just talk us through what exactly happened there and Kissinger's role in it.
Kissinger's role was he became the chief negotiator of the United States with the North Vietnamese in their attempt to bring the war to an end. Part of the Nixon approach was. It is true that they began to draw down troops after the election in 1968 and in 1970. Even as the war is being drawn down, they begin to put pressure on supply lines from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. This was on the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran along the border with Cambodia.
So they started bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail. And there was no authorization from Congress for this. And when the news broke, as it inevitably did, Nixon had to. Basically. He confessed it on national television in May 1970. This is not an invasion of Cambodia. The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied and controlled by North Vietnamese forces.
Campuses erupted. This was an extension of the war he had promised to end the war. And in the riots that followed, four students were killed at Kent State University. We went to Washington, there were big demonstrations.
It so turned the country against the war that diplomacy had to increase, and that's what happened.
And it's estimated that some 50,000 civilians were killed in that secret carpet bombing of Cambodia in that period 69 to 70.
And it's that that really forms the sort of central part of the as it were prosecution when people level the charge of war criminal against Henry Kissinger. In part, because, as I said, it was secret, it wasn't fully revealed to Congress or to the American people that this is what the Nixon-Kissinger White House was up to.
Exactly, but there would be so many others. I mean, they messed with people's nations, they interfered without any sense that it's a wrong thing to do. And so that blood is on Henry Kissinger's hands as well.
So this is the notion of Henry Kissinger as the epitome of realpolitik, the notion that you are unsentimental, you're not idealistic. This is the world of. You know, I don't care that he's a son of a bitch, he's our son of a bitch. You back all kinds of villains. And the roll call of Unita in Angola, or the Contras in Nicaragua, and various kinds of dictators in Africa and in the Middle East. Kissinger's Washington backing them if they would suit U.S. interests geopolitically.
That's the kind of philosophy, and that is what leads Kissinger in a way to be this sort of hate figure, particularly. I would say, Michael for your generation. The thing that, though, remains huge in his reputation is the opening to China. And it's famous because it was obviously the meeting of Chairman Mao of China and President Nixon of the United States. But seen as the architect of it was Henry Kissinger, and in a way, it's an interesting thing to put on Henry Kissinger.
Nixon a famous anti-communist, kissinger at his side, and yet it's this huge thing that makes Kissinger's reputation. What was going on there? Why was Kissinger the man to push and prod Nixon to an opening with China?
You take the communist world from Russia, Russia's borders, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, it's communist. He perceived rightly that China had its own national interest in the world of communism and was available for a break with Russia. And by splitting these two monolithic countries apart, you could balance one against the other, you could play one off against the other. I think without the opening to China, creating, especially once Mao was dead, the possibility that China could become more open economically. This did shape the world in which we live as much as anything.
Because we're still dealing with the growth of China as an economic power, it is still a communist country, it is still a one-state country. But Kissinger's idea that in some way, you could split the Soviet Union apart from the People's Republic paid enormous dividends for America.
Although Simon Tisdall, a former Guardian colleague of mine, writing in The Guardian, did put the contrary view in saying. Actually, it was bringing in China from the cold, which was the first step on the way to China. Becoming this surging economic and then military power, which has actually created a geopolitical rival for the United States in 2023. And in a way, the route to that began with the opening to China of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. So everything, every decision Kissinger made, is still debated, even half a century later. I just want to touch on one last geopolitical area before we talk about some of, if you like, the kind of domestic politics of Kissinger. And that is the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago last month.
HENRy Kissinger You know, you've said before, Jewish American, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. There was a lot of assumptions about how he would react to Israel being attacked by its neighbours in Syria and in Egypt. In October 73, Kissinger did not follow the script his critics had, if you like, written for him. His reaction surprised people. Tell us what his reaction was, and then the crucial role he played. As if you like the inventor of shuttle diplomacy in the closing weeks of that conflict.
Yeah, well, this is very interesting because in the lead up to this war, Watergate is reaching its first important boiling point, and Nixon is drunk on duty. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
I've earned everything I've got. So Kissinger is essentially running the free world. He, first of all, had to deal with the Russians. He had a good line of communication with the Soviets ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dubrinin. And they agreed that for three or four days, it wasn't a bad thing for both sides to bleed a little to let the heat out.
And then it became clear that Israel was running out of ammunition. And although Kissinger at one point had tried to prove how bad he was, what a bad tough guy he was. To Nixon, who had a strain of anti-semitism running right up his spine, he pushed everyone out of the way in Washington and got a resupply going. And it was arguably the turning point in the war, as Israel got resupplied with things as basic as you know, shells to, you know, to shoot out of cannon. They were able to push the Egyptians back to the other side of the canal they drove to within 40 kilometers of Damascus.
And then Kissinger said, Enough.
In this country which has suffered so much, and of a people that has suffered so much, no gift could be greater than the possibility of a true and lasting peace.
And a ceasefire was organized. And, as you said, Jonathan, he began to personally. By this point, you know, he'd won the Nobel Peace Prize, which was an odd thing to get.
That brought the remark, didn't it that satire is dead when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize because so many Americans associated him with war?
And this was for negotiating America's getting out of Vietnam with the North Vietnamese. He shared the prize with the North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho. And so he was at the height of his power underlying the war in 1973, the Yom Kippur war was. Egypt wanted to negotiate the return of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had conquered in 1967, and he began the shuttle diplomacy.
It went on as long as Nixon was removed from office or resigned. But it went on until 1976, when Jimmy Carter was elected president and then Kissinger was no longer in power.
It's a remarkable period, actually, because in those closing months of the Nixon presidency, Henry Kissinger wore two hats. He was both national security advisor and secretary of state. I think the only time that's ever happened with these two huge jobs are held by one person. And yeah, as we've been saying, invented really shuttle diplomacy, you read that in the October after October of 1973 war? He spent 33 consecutive days in the Middle East, negotiating disengagement between Israel and Syria, shuttling back and forth while he was secretary of state.
I mean, the State Department didn't know what had hit him, just in terms of the circumstances then of Nixon.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interests of America first.
Obviously, in that period, Nixon is forced out of office over Watergate, Kissinger's, perhaps in some ways, his closest aid. Even though, as you've said, you know, Nixon had some pretty anti-semitic attitudes and, in private, used ethnic slurs to describe his own secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. They are close and there is this bond between them. And just tell us about this scene that did become famous, that one of the last nights in office, that when Nixon is alone, as we've heard, he's drinking heavily.
He knows his time is running out. One of the people who's with him later would say they prayed together was Henry Kissinger.
Yes, this is documented in books by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He invited Henry to come in and pray, and they got down on their knees and prayed. He was looking for guidance at this point. All of Nixon's closest aides have been indicted.
Some of them have already been convicted. He is alone, he's the most powerful man in the world, and he's completely alone. And I think it speaks to two outsiders.
I mean, never forget that you can be born on American soil and be a complete outsider in America. And I do think Richard Nixon always felt like an outsider. Henry Kissinger was in fact, born in Germany, a Jew, and he absolutely was an outsider. And through dint of egotistical will, both men ended up at the epicenter of American power. And I think, who else would you talk to?
Yeah, it is a perfect scene. Kissinger obviously went on to be secretary of state for two more years under the interim president, if you like, of President Gerald Ford. And then after that he's out of office. And yet, for the best part of half a century, remained an influential figure. He goes into the private sector, kissinger consultants and is a requested figure around the world, constantly meeting heads of government.
He met Vladimir Putin in 2017.
I remember covering when Bill Clinton brought him into the White House to have a conversation with him. And plenty of world leaders thereafter would want to be photographed with him. But nevertheless, he remained this kind of divisive figure. And there was a debate in the 2020 election in the Democratic primaries between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, in which Hillary Clinton was sort of name dropping. That she'd been talking to Henry Kissinger?
And Bernie Sanders shot back and said, I'm proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend and I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. What does it say to you? Do you think, looking back on his very long life, that even decades after he left office A he was still sought after? You know, I heard him address a breakfast of dignitaries just a few months ago in London. Age 100. When he was telling me and other people in the room that he planned to be involved as an advisor. Somehow, in the 2024 campaign, when he would have been 101 and still able to divide audiences, what is it particularly about Kissinger that enabled him to have both?
After the opening to China. And the other policy that Kissinger helped design, which was Detente, which was an understanding with the Soviet Union. We won't poach on your patch and you don't poach on ours, and we'll maintain the balance. There were a lot of Republicans who were staunchly anti-communist, I mean, so was Henry Kissinger, but they weren't interested in real politic, they were interested in confrontation.
And their hero was Ronald Reagan, and when Ronald Reagan was elected, he in many ways, kind of rolled back on Detente. And Kissinger was on the outs with that Republican party, and I'm not sure he ever really got back into that Republican party, which dominated. Up until the moment. That Donald Trump somehow mesmerized everyone in that party, that his way was the way forward. So to understand Kissinger's importance and why he was still consulted at the age of 100, you have to understand that what we call in America the Amtrak corridor, he was the most important intellectual.
I find it hard to acknowledge, but he was, for many, the most important public intellectual of these last 60 years. Outside of that, that's not the case.
Michael Goldfarb, host of the podcast The First Rough Draft of History and longtime watcher of American politics, including on the life of Henry Kissinger, Thanks so much for talking to me for Politics Weekly America.
Always my pleasure Jonathan. thanks for having me on.
And there will be a link to Michael's podcast and his substack on today's episode description on the Guardian website. Now, normally I say at this point, that is all from me for this week, but this time it isn't. News of Henry Kissinger's death came after I'd recorded a really interesting conversation with Jerome Foster, who's a climate activist and the youngest ever White House advisor. Together, we spoke about President Biden's climate policies, those that Jerome agrees with and those he very much departs from. The conversation was sparked by the news that Joe Biden would not be attending COP28 this year.
Jerome and I discussed the message the president's absence might send to both younger voters and people around the world. That episode will hit your feeds this Sunday, so do look out for that. But for now, it's goodbye. The producer is Danielle Stevens, the executive producer this week Max Sanderson.
I'm Jonathan Friedland, thanks as always for listening.
This is The Guardian.
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