Jeremi Suri. Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. 368 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-02579-0.

Reviewed by Jost Dülffer (Historisches Seminar, Universität zu Köln)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Understanding Henry Kissinger--But Not Loving Him

Why do we need another book about Henry Kissinger, the first non-native-born U.S. secretary of state and the first Jew in this position? Are there not at least a half-dozen source-based scholarly books, some with up to nine hundred pages, on Kissinger? Can we not read his four volumes of memoirs? Is he not a famous historian who began his career with scholarly books about international relations at the time of Viscount Castlereagh and Prince Klemens von Metternich, and about the "white revolutionary," Otto von Bismarck? And finally: did Kissinger not end his career as a historian with a comprehensive history of international relations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Diplomacy (1994), translated inadequately into German as Die Vernunft der Nationen (1995)? The answer may be that a critical reevaluation is necessary precisely because of the bulk of available material. Kissinger is one of the most debated and criticized politicians of the last decades. A broad literature, both popular and scholarly, tends to depict Kissinger as a scoundrel or even a criminal, because of his cooperation with the CIA, his friendly talks with dictators, or his vulgar speech in the company of Richard Nixon and other officials. Jeremy Suri's approach is different. He wants the reader to understand what made Henry Kissinger tick. He thus does not write a conventional biography, but rather a thick description of his formative years. This approach allots only two of six chapters to his political career as national security adviser and secretary of state from 1969 to 1977. His life after leaving office is barely touched upon in this book.

It does not make much sense in a brief review to recall the stages of Kissinger's career and to assess his foreign policy as such.[1] Of course, this book also narrates all the relevant events elaborately. Suri's aim, however, is not to focus on "what Kissinger did, but on why he did it" (p. 5). The author, perhaps overstating the issue somewhat in the book title, parallels the "American century" (a term coined by Henry Luce in 1942) with Kissinger's career in that century: "Kissinger's career captured the mix of Jewish privilege and exclusion that characterized the American century" (p. 11). The author convincingly begins with young Henry's youth as a German Jew in Fürth, Bavaria, which he left with his family shortly before the pogroms of November 1938. This experience of the "contested and transformed social status of Jews is crucial to understanding Kissinger's career" (p. 13). For him, democracy remained an inherently precarious form of government that offered a chance for Bildung, but had to be protected. On several occasions later in his life, the politician referred to the experiences of Jews during the National Socialist period as a lesson.

While discussing this early material, Suri is convincing and draws on a broad range of scholarly literature, including German materials. Even so, I find one of Suri's central propositions less convincing--that for Kissinger, "too much democracy, on the model of Weimar democracy, was the problem" (p. 8)--both with regard to Kissinger's own rare references to this notion, as well as in light of its significance in the context of historical scholarship on the Weimar period. The story of a republic with too few republicans comes closer to the reality of Weimar. In contrast, Suri is much stronger in describing Henry's socialization in Washington Heights in New York, his military training, and his return to Germany as an American soldier during the occupation period. In becoming American, Suri argues, Kissinger not only translated "the interests of various societies into a coherent global vision" (p. 57) but also legitimized the "construction of a transatlantic Judeo-Christian identity" that "made Jews 'white' by outlawing many of the anti-Semitic assumptions about race and ethnicity" also present in the United States (p. 61). Given that in his later career, Kissinger tried to conceal his Jewish background, I am not fully convinced of the importance of a Judeo-Christian amalgam, regardless of Suri's comparisons of Kissinger with Sigmund Freud, Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, or Carl J. Friedrich, all of whom are identified somewhat too directly or matter-of-factly with Kissinger.

After having served in Krefeld and Bentheim, Kissinger returned to the United States and studied at Harvard University. Here, his remarkable career began. According to Suri, American universities never really demobilized after World War II, but transformed themselves into centers of Cold War scholarship and education. Kissinger became important as organizer of an international seminar at Harvard that was designed to create international networks. The "social outsider" Kissinger thus turned into a "Cold War insider" (p. 109). At Harvard, students from all over the world were imbued with notions about the "free world." To sum up this formative phase: "If Fürth defined his German Jewish identity, and the U.S Army defined his American citizenship, Harvard as the dominant Cold War university defined his intellectual persona" (p. 95).

As early as his undergraduate thesis, which Suri reads closely, Kissinger displayed a remarkable knowledge of philosophers and political scientists, from Immanuel Kant via Oswald Spengler to Arnold Toynbee. His later historical works on Clemens von Metternich, Robert Steward Viscount Castlereagh, and Otto von Bismarck, Suri asserts, demonstrate the direct transfer of their approaches to his future political notions of "Realpolitik." I would be more cautious, however, in arguing that there is only an indirect connection between Kissinger's historical works and his own diplomacy. Kissinger's willingness to take into consideration the options of his opposite numbers and his habit of negotiating from the basis of his assumptions about the possible may be a bit too limited as evidence for the (self)-identification of the historian with famous statesmen of the nineteenth century. In Diplomacy, in particular, Kissinger's views became more nuanced. He accepted not only democracy as a basis for political action, but also idealism in the Wilsonian sense as one pole of motivation in any given international system.

Of course, Suri also notes that the basic conditions for conducting international politics had changed between the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, not least because of nuclear weapons, another major topic of this book. Kissinger became one among an early group of theorists influenced by and alongside of Thomas Schelling, whose ideas are sometimes identified with Kissinger's. Suri points to the importance of these ideas: "Leaders ... had to create avenues for forceful action which were neither suicidal nor complaisant" (p. 140). Barely thirty years old, the young Kissinger had already elaborated on the consequences the atomic bomb had for international politics, and he saw clearly that total war meant suicide. This awareness did not prevent him from openly threatening the deployment of nuclear weapons in order to enhance his credibility in certain cases. Another solution to the dilemmas of a bipolar nuclear world, which Kissinger developed towards the end of the 1960s, was the creation of a world with "more centers of decision" (p. 180). In particular, such a world meant a normalization of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China (another relationship, by the way, in which conditions were quite different in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth). Given his unique expertise on this topic, Kissinger gained access to U.S. presidents beginning with Dwight Eisenhower and continuing up to the present.

Most of the time, Suri appears to be a subtle, but sympathetic, convincing apologist for the life and career of the national security adviser and secretary of state. Following an initial meeting in Fürth, the author had the opportunity to interview Kissinger many times and maintained contact with him during the research for this book. But divergent features also come into view, so that the author's overall assessment is much more critical. While Richard Nixon is simply termed a "gangster" (pp. 204, 210), Kissinger's shortcomings are also openly mentioned. Suri's most severe criticism appears in connection with the Vietnam War. Others have to do with Kissinger's "silence" vis-à-vis the proliferation of non-state actors, his overriding self-confidence in the face of complex situations (which he frequently underestimated), and finally, his lack of regard for faith and emotions. I would argue that taken together, Suri's observations about Kissinger describe the statesman's skepticism about belief in a world he saw as populated with rationally motivated actors. Even so, Kissinger 's neglect of the importance of emotion and arguments was not based strictly on his understanding of reason. Moreover, Suri's verdict on Kissinger as a thinker ("The statesman was both a philosopher and a politician, a scholar of Bildung and a practitioner of policy" [p. 195]) is, in my opinion, a bit overstated, as it links Kissinger to Plato.

In sum, by interpreting Kissinger in light of his German and Jewish roots, Suri does remarkably well in understanding one of the most controversial American politicians of the Cold War period. The book is brilliantly written and based on a large number of archival sources, including (to a certain extent) German scholarly literature. Unfortunately, however, it is only to some degree an intellectual biography, as the rich body of publications Kissinger turned out after leaving office is neglected. Suri also discusses charges against the statesman's administration of his political offices only in passing. Will critics of Kissinger be able to understand him better, or even pardon him, after reading this book? In the end, this is not Suri's question.

Note

[1]. Others have done this competently already in a H-Diplo roundtable; see http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Kissinger-AmericanCentury-Roundtable.pdf .

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Citation: Jost Dülffer. Review of Suri, Jeremi, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24116

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