58 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
BOOKS
THE WAGES OF REALISM
Making sense of Henry Kissinger.By Thomas MeaneyTHE CRITICS
ABOVE: SERGE BLOCH
I
n 1952, at the age of twenty-eight,
Henry Kissinger did what enter-
prising graduate students do when
they want to hedge their academic fu-
ture: he started a magazine. He picked
an imposing name—Confluence—and
enlisted illustrious contributors: Han-
nah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Lillian
Smith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Rein-
hold Niebuhr. The publisher James
Laughlin, who was a backer of the mag-
azine, described the young Kissinger
as “a thoroughly sincere person (terri-
bly earnest Germanic type) who is try-
ing his hardest to do an idealistic job.”
Like his other early production, the
Harvard International Seminar, a sum-
mer program that convened partici-
pants from around the world—Kissin-
ger gamely volunteered to spy on
attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine
opened channels for him not only with
policymakers in Washington but also
with an older generation of German
Jewish thinkers whose political expe-
rience had been formed in the early
thirties, when the Weimar Republic
was supplanted by the Nazi regime.
For Cold War liberals, who saw the
stirrings of fascism in everything from
McCarthyism to the rise of mass cul-
ture, Weimar was a cautionary tale,
conferring a certain authority on those
who had survived. Kissinger cultivated
the Weimar intellectuals, but he was
not impressed by their prospects for
influence. Although he later invoked
the memory of Nazism to justify all
manner of power plays, at this stage he
was building a reputation as an
all-American maverick. He appalled
the émigrés by running an article in
Confluence by Ernst von Salomon, a
far-rightist who had hired a getaway
driver for the men who assassinated
the Weimar Republic’s foreign minis-
ter. “I have now joined you as a cardi-
nal villain in the liberal demonology,”
Kissinger told a friend afterward, jok-
ing that the piece was being taken as
“a symptom of my totalitarian and even
Nazi sympathies.”
For more than sixty years, Henry
Kissinger’s name has been synony-
mous with the foreign-policy doctrine
called “realism.” In his time as national-
security adviser and Secretary of State
to President Richard Nixon, his will-
ingness to speak frankly about the
U.S.’s pursuit of power in a chaotic
world brought him both acclaim and
notoriety. Afterward, the case against
him built, bolstered by a stream of
declassified documents chronicling ac-
tions across the globe. Seymour Hersh,
in “The Price of Power” (1983), por-
trayed Kissinger as an unhinged para-
noiac; Christopher Hitchens, in “The
Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), styled
his attack as a charge sheet for pros-
ecuting him as a war criminal.
But Kissinger, now approaching his
ninety-seventh birthday, no longer in-
spires such widespread loathing. As
former critics crept toward the politi-
cal center and rose to power them-
selves, passions cooled. Hillary Clin-
ton, who, as a law student at Yale,
vocally opposed Kissinger’s bombing
of Cambodia, has described the “astute
observations” he shared with her when
she was Secretary of State, writing in
an effusive review of his most recent
book that “Kissinger is a friend.” Duringone of the 2008 Presidential debates,
John McCain and Barack Obama each
cited Kissinger as supporting their (op-
posite) postures toward Iran. Saman-
tha Power, the most celebrated critic
of the U.S.’s failure to halt genocides,
was not above receiving the Henry A.
Kissinger Prize from him.
Kissinger has proved fertile ground
for historians and publishers. There are
psychoanalytic studies, tell-alls by for-
mer girlfriends, compendiums of his
quotations, and business books about
his dealmaking. Two of the most sig-
nificant recent assessments appeared
in 2015: the first volume of Niall Fer-
guson’s authorized biography, which
appraised Kissinger sympathetically
from the right, and Greg Grandin’s “Kis-
singer’s Shadow,” which approached
him critically from the left. From op-
posing perspectives, they converged in
questioning the profundity of Kissin-
ger’s realism. In Ferguson’s account,
Kissinger enters as a young idealist who
follows every postwar foreign-policy
fashion and repeatedly attaches him-
self to the wrong Presidential candi-
dates, until he finally gets lucky with
Nixon. Grandin’s Kissinger, despite
speaking the language of realists—“cred-
ibility,” “linkage,” “balance of power”—
has a view of reality so cavalier as to be
radically relativist.
Barry Gewen’s new book, “The In-
evitability of Tragedy” (Norton), be-
longs to the neither-revile-him-nor-
revere-him school of Kissingerology.
“No one has thought more deeply about
international affairs,” Gewen writes,
and adds, “Kissinger’s thinking runs so
counter to what Americans believe or