60 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
For all the imputations of Kissin
ger’s Germanness, the indelible expe
rience of his youth was serving in the
84th Infantry Division as it swept
through Europe. “He was more Amer
ican than I have ever seen any Amer
ican,” a comrade recalled. The work of
the U.S. occupation, with its opportu
nities for quickly assuming positions
of authority, thrilled him. In 1945, Kis
singer participated in the liberation of
the Ahlem concentration camp, out
side Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star
for his role in breaking up a Gestapo
sleeper cell.
In 1947, Kissinger enrolled at Har
vard on the G.I. Bill, intending to
study political science and English
literature. He found a second men
tor, William Yandell Elliott, a well
connected history professor from the
Wasp élite, who advised a series of
U.S. Presidents on international affairs.
The young Kissinger was drawn less
to the classic exponents of Realpoli
tik, such as Clausewitz and Bismarck,
than to “philosophers of history” like
Kant and anatomists of civilizational
decay such as Arnold Toynbee and
Oswald Spengler. From these think
ers, Kissinger cobbled together his own
view of how history operated. It was
not a story of liberal progress, or of
class consciousness, or of cycles of birth,
maturity, and decline; rather, it was “a
series of meaningless incidents,” fleet
ingly given shape by the application of
human will. As a young in
fantryman, Kissinger had
learned that victors ran
sacked history for analo
gies to gild their triumphs,
while the vanquished sought
out the historical causes of
their misfortune.
Ferguson and Grandin
both seize on one sentence
in Kissinger’s undergrad
uate thesis, titled “The
Meaning of History”: “The realm of
freedom and necessity can not be rec
onciled except by an inward experi
ence.” Such a deeply subjective world
view might seem surprising in Kissin
ger, but French existentialism had ar
rived at Harvard, and the thesis cited
JeanPaul Sartre. Both Sartre and Kis
singer believed that morality was de
termined by action. But for Sartre ac
tion created the possibility of individual
and collective responsibility, whereas
for Kissinger moral indeterminacy was
a condition of human freedom.
I
n 1951, while pursuing graduate stud
ies, Kissinger worked as a consultant
with the Army’s Operations Research
Office, where he became familiar with
the Defense Department’s penchant
for psychological warfare. To Kissin
ger’s peers at Harvard, tailoring their
résumés to the needs of the U.S. se
curity state, his doctoral work—on
the Congress of Vienna and its conse
quences—seemed whimsically anti
quarian. But his published dissertation
invoked thermonuclear weapons in its
first sentence, and presented readers in
Washington with an unmistakable his
torical analogy: the British and Aus
trian Empires’ efforts to contain Na
poleon’s France held lessons for dealing
with the Soviet Union.
Kissinger is sometimes called the
American Metternich, a reference to
the Austrian statesman who forged the
postNapoleonic peace. But here,
weighing the careers of the men he
wrote about, he stressed the limitations
of Metternich as a model:
Lacking in Metternich is the attribute which
has enabled the spirit to transcend an impasse
at so many crises of history: the ability to con-
template an abyss, not with the detachment of
a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome—or
perish in the process....For men become
myths, not by what they know, nor even by
what they achieve, but by the tasks they set
themselves.
Kissinger was taking a swipe at the
brighteyed social scientists around him,
who thought that the deadly confron
tation of the Cold War could be solved
with empirical and behavioral models,
rather than with existential swagger.
In 1954, Harvard did not offer Kis
singer the junior professorship he had
hoped for, but the dean of the faculty,
McGeorge Bundy, recommended him
to the Council on Foreign Relations,
where Kissinger started managing a
study group on nuclear weapons. In
Eisenhowerera Washington, a fresh
take on nuclear weapons could make
your name. In 1957, Kissinger published
the book that established him as a pub
lic figure, “Nuclear Weapons and For
eign Policy.” It argued that the Eisen
wish to believe.” Gewen, an editor at
the New York Times Book Review, traces
Kissinger’s most momentous foreign
policy decisions to his experience as “a
child of Weimar.” Although Gewen is
aware of the pitfalls of attributing too
much to a regime that collapsed be
fore his subject’s tenth birthday, he is
fascinated by the connections between
Kissinger and his émigré elders, whose
experiences of liberal democracy made
them fear democracy’s capacity to un
dermine liberalism.
H
einz Kissinger was born in 1923
in Fürth, a city in Bavaria. His
family fled to New York shortly before
Kristallnacht, settling in Washington
Heights, a neighborhood with so many
German immigrants that it was some
times known as the Fourth Reich. They
spoke English at home, and Heinz be
came Henry. In his youth, he displayed
few remarkable qualities beyond en
thusiasm for Italian defensive soccer
tactics and a knack for advising his
friends on their amorous exploits. As
a teenager, he worked in a shaving
brush factory before school, and as
pired to become an accountant.
In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into
the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne,
Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Krae
mer, a GermanAmerican private fifteen
years his senior, whom Kissinger would
call “the greatest single influence on my
formative years.” A Nietzschean fire
brand to the point of
selfparody—he wore a
monocle in his good eye to
make his weak eye work
harder—Kraemer claimed
to have spent the late Wei
mar years fighting both
Communists and Nazi
Brown Shirts in the streets.
He had doctorates in po
litical science and interna
tional law, and pursued a
promising career at the League of Na
tions before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939.
He warned Kissinger not to emulate
“cleverling” intellectuals and their blood
less costbenefit analyses. Believing Kis
singer to be “musically attuned to his
tory,” he told him, “Only if you do not
‘calculate’ will you really have the free
dom which distinguishes you from the
little people.”
