The Sunday Times Magazine • 39F
rom our first meeting [in
1973, when Thatcher was
education secretary],
Thatcher’s vitality and
commitment fixed her
notion of leadership firmly in
my mind. Nearly every other politician
of the era argued that to win elections,
one had to capture the centre ground.
Thatcher demurred. That approach,
she asserted, amounted to a subversion
of democracy. The quest for the centre
was a recipe for vacuity; instead,
different arguments had to clash,
creating real choices for the voter.
An event that helped shape our
burgeoning relationship was
Thatcher’s visit to Washington in
September 1977. The national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski advised
President Carter to “plead a heavy
schedule” and refuse to meet with
Thatcher; Carter obliged. As a result,
she was treated with less attention than
she had expected given her own warm
feelings for the United States.Nancy and I invited her to dinner
one evening, together with leading
Washington personalities from both
parties, an informal occasion that set
the tone for our future meetings. After
becoming prime minister, Thatcher
generally invited me for private
discussions to exchange views on
international topics — or simply to
cross-check the prevailing views of her
Foreign Office against my own analysis
of international affairs.
Shortly after Thatcher became leader
of the Conservative Party, she outlined
her concepts at a meeting with me
over a traditional English breakfast at
Claridge’s. Articulate and thoughtful,
she made clear that her ambition was
nothing less than to transform the
country. She aimed to do so not by
pursuing some vague middle ground,
but by articulating a programme that
would make the middle ground see
things as she did. Her rhetoric and
policies would strike a genuine
contrast to the staid conventionalNevertheless, he says, the two superpowers
“have a minimum common obligation to
prevent [a catastrophic collision] from
happening”. This was in fact his main point
at Davos, though it went largely unnoticed.
“We in the West have seemingly
incompatible tasks. You need defence
establishments capable of dealing with the
modern challenges. At the same time you
need some kind of positive expression of
your society so that these exertions are in
the name of something, because otherwise
they won’t be sustained. Secondly, you
need a concept of co-operation with the
other society, because you cannot now
work out any concept of destroying them.
So a dialogue is necessary.”
“But that dialogue has stopped,” I note.
“Apart from the airing of grievances. That
is what deeply worries me about where we
are going. And other countries will want to
exploit this rivalry, without understanding
its unique aspects.” A nod, I surmise, to the
growing number of countries seeking
economic and military aid from one or
other superpower. “So we’re heading into
a very difficult period.”
I ask if Kissinger thinks of himself as a
leader. “When I started I probably didn’t,”
he replies. “But I do now. Not in a total
sense ... [but] I attempt to be a leader. All of
the books I’ve written have an element of
‘How do you get to the future?’ ”
I point out that this is excessive modesty.
Having led the National Security Council,
the State Department and, at times during
Watergate, practically the US government,
he is a fully qualified leader, even if never an
elected one.
It is time to leave. The nonagenarian may
still be firing on all cylinders, but I am fading
and have a plane to catch. A final inspiration
prompts me to ask about the necessary
corollary of leadership. “What about
followership?” I ask. “Has that declined as
well? Are people less willing to be led?”
“Yes,” he nods. “The paradox is that the
need for leadership is as great as ever.”
There are those who will doubtless
continue to demonise Henry Kissinger and
disregard or disparage what he says. At 99,
however, he can well afford to ignore the
haters. Yet he has not lost his impulse to lead.
“Leadership,” he writes, “is needed to help
people reach from where they are to where
they have never been and, sometimes, can
scarcely imagine going. Without leadership,
institutions drift, and nations court growing
irrelevance and, ultimately, disaster.”
You are under no obligation to follow. But
to drift to disaster without any leadership
— or, worse, with fake leadership bereft of
self-discipline — seems like a worse idea nNiall Ferguson is the Milbank Family
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He is the author of Kissinger, 1923-1968:
The Idealist. The second volume will be
completed in 2023Kissinger with Margaret Thatcher at Claridge’s in 1975,
the year she became leader of the oppositionLOW-RESKissinger on Thatcher —
“there were no sacred cows”
The former UK prime minister’s resistance to entering
any kind of middle ground left a lasting impression➤
ALAMY