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hower Administration needed to steel
itself to use tactical nuclear weapons
in conventional wars. To reserve nu
clear weapons only for doomsday sce
narios left the U.S. unable to respond
decisively to incremental Soviet incur
sions. Kissinger intended his thesis to
be provocative, and could not have
known that Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs
of Staff had been telling the President
much the same thing for years.
By the late fifties, Kissinger did not
need to choose whether to be an aca
demic, a public intellectual, a bureau
crat, or a politician. Each sphere of ac
tivity enhanced his value in the others.
He was a soughtafter consultant to
Presidential candidates; assuming that
America’s Wasp aristocracy offered the
likeliest path to power, he spent years
tutoring Nelson Rockefeller in foreign
policy. In 1961, Bundy, who had become
President John F. Kennedy’s national
security adviser, hired Kissinger as a
consultant. Kissinger also finally got
tenure at Harvard. Members of the fac
ulty objected that his nuclearweapons
book was unscholarly, but Bundy
pushed the appointment through, per
suading the Ford Foundation to put
up money for his professorship.
K
issinger is hard to place among the
foreignpolicy thinkers of his time.
Does he belong with America’s most
idiosyncratic and brilliant strategists,
such as George Kennan and Nicholas
Spykman? Typically, he is categorized
with lesser “defense intellectuals,” such
as Hans Speier and Albert Wohlstet
ter. These men moved fluidly between
lecture halls and RAND Corporation
laboratories, where they complained
about student protesters and gave alarm
ing slideshow presentations about nu
clear apocalypse.
Gewen prefers to put Kissinger
among the more highminded Wei
mar émigrés, although the “family re
semblances” he finds are hard to pin
down. Arendt never warmed to him,
but they shared a disappointment about
the U.S.’s early performance in the
Cold War. In her book “On Revolu
tion,” Arendt worried that postcolo
nial nations, rather than choosing to
copy American political institutions,
were following the Communist script
of economic liberation through revo
lution. Kissinger argued that the U.S.
needed to better broadcast its ideol
ogy, and he did so with an evangeli
cal fervor that went beyond anything
Arendt intended. “A capitalist society,
or, what is more interesting to me, a
free society, is a more revolutionary
phenomenon than nineteenthcentury
socialism,” Kissinger said, in an inter
view with Mike Wallace, in 1958. “I
think we should go on the spiritual
offensive.” This was the impulse not
of a critical intellectual but of some
one who did not question the Amer
ican global mission.
The émigré closer in viewpoint to
Kissinger was Hans Morgenthau, the
father of modern foreignpolicy real
ism. The two met at Harvard and main
tained a professional friendship that
waxed and waned over the decades.
“There was no thinker who meant more
to Kissinger than Morgenthau,” Gewen
writes. Like Kissinger, Morgenthau had
become well known with a popular book
about foreign policy, “Politics Among
Nations” (1948). And he shared Kissin
ger’s belief that foreign policy could not
be left to technocrats with flowcharts
and statistics. But, unlike Kissing e r,
Morgenthau was unwilling to sacrifice
his realist principles for political in
fluence. In the midsixties, working as
a consultant for the Johnson Adminis
tration, he was publicly critical of the
Vietnam War, which he believed jeop
ardized America’s status as a great power,
and Johnson had him fired.
Morgenthau and Kissinger both re
sisted describing themselves as practi
tioners of Realpolitik—Kissinger re
coiled at the term—but Realpolitik has
proved a remarkably flexible concept
ever since it emerged, in nineteenth
century Prussia. Political thinkers grap
pling with Prussia’s rise on a continent
crowded with competing powers pro
pounded several strains of strategic
thought. In an increasingly bourgeois
society, diplomacy could no longer be
tailored to the whims and rivalries of
a royal court; prudent foreign policy
required marshalling everything at a
state’s disposal—public support, com
merce, law—in order to project the
image of power toward its rivals. The
irony is that these doctrines were at
root an attempt to codify something
that their adherents believed Anglo
American statesmen already did in
stinctively. “We Germans write fat vol
umes about Realpolitik but understand
it no better than babies in a nursery,”
the New Republic editor Walter Weyl
recalled being told by a German pro
fessor during the First World War. “You
“It says it wants to do a crossword.”
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