34 • The Sunday Times Magazineenry Kissinger turned 99 on May 27. Born
in Germany at the height of the Weimar
hyperinflation, he was not yet ten years old
when Hitler came to power and was just 15
when he and his family landed as refugees
in New York City. It is somehow almost as
astonishing that this former US secretary
of state and giant of geopolitics left office
45 years ago.
As he heads towards his century,
Kissinger has lost none of the intellectual
firepower that set him apart from other
foreign policy professors and practitioners
of his and subsequent generations. In the
time I have spent writing the second
volume of his biography, Kissinger has
published not one but two books — the
first, co-authored with the former Google
CEO Eric Schmidt and the computer
scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, on artificial
intelligence, the second a collection of six
biographical case studies in leadership.
We meet at his rural retreat, deep in the
woods of Connecticut, where he and his
wife, Nancy, have spent most of their time
since the onset of Covid. The pandemic had
its silver linings for them. It was the first
time in 48 years of marriage that the
compulsively peripatetic Dr Kissinger came
to an enforced halt. Cut off from the
temptations of Manhattan restaurants and
Beijing banquets, he has shed pounds.
Though he walks with a stick, depends on a
hearing aid and speaks more slowly than of
old in that unmistakable bullfrog baritone,
his mind is as keen as ever.
Nor has Kissinger lost his knack for
infuriating the liberal professors and
progressive or “woke” students who
dominate Harvard, the university where he
built his reputation as a scholar and public
intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s.
Every secretary of state and national
security adviser (the first post he held in
government) has had to make choices
between bad and worse options. Antony
Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who currently
hold those positions, last year abandoned the
people of Afghanistan to the Taliban and thisyear are pouring tens of billions of dollars’
worth of weapons into the war zone that is
Ukraine. Somehow those actions do not
arouse the invective that has been directed
at Kissinger over the years for his role in such
events as the Vietnam War (a significant
amount of criticism has also come from the
right, though for very different reasons).
Nothing could better illustrate his ability
to enrage both left and right than the
controversy sparked by his brief speech at
the World Economic Forum in Davos on
May 23. “Henry Kissinger: Ukraine must
give Russia territory” was The Telegraph’s
headline, arousing almost equal numbers of
enraged tweets from progressives who have
added Ukraine’s blue and yellow colours to
the latest version of the pride flag and
neoconservatives who are baying for a
Ukrainian victory and regime change in
Moscow. In a scathing response, the
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky,
accused Kissinger of favouring 1938-style
appeasement of fascist Russia.
The oddest thing about the furore was
that Kissinger said nothing of the sort. In
arguing that some kind of peace must
eventually be negotiated, he simply stated
that “the dividing line [between Ukraine
and Russia] should be a return to the statusquo ante” — meaning the situation before
February 24, when parts of Donetsk and
Luhansk were under the control of
pro-Moscow separatists and Crimea was
part of Russia, as has been the case since- That is what Zelensky himself has
said on more than one occasion, though
some Ukrainian spokesmen have recently
argued for a return to the pre-2014 borders.
Such misinterpretations are nothing new
to Kissinger. When he was trying to
persuade Barack Obama to pull out of
Afghanistan, the vice-president, Joe Biden,
drew an unfortunate analogy with the
disgraced former US president Richard
Nixon. “We have to be on our way out,” he
told the veteran diplomat Richard
Holbrooke, “to do what we did in Vietnam.”
Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative
for Afghanistan and Pakistan, replied that
he “thought we had a certain obligation to
the people who had trusted us”. Biden’s
response was revealing: “F*** that,” he
reportedly told Holbrooke. “We don’t have
to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Yet the reality was, again, quite different.
Nixon and Kissinger wholly rejected the
idea of abandoning South Vietnam to its
fate, as antiwar protesters urged them to in
H
INTERVIEW BY NIALL FERGUSON
Henry Kissinger fitting in a visit to the White House barber shop in 1972I ask if the US is more divided now than at the
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