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The Kissinger Wars Barbara Keys The Kissinger Wars IMPIETIES Early in their new books on Henry Kissinger, the record of America’s most controversial Niall Ferguson and Greg Grandin tell the same statesman. story about a decisive break between Kissinger For Grandin, now the standard-bearer for and his former Harvard colleagues over the U.S. what we might describe as the Kissinger-as- invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. A evil-mastermind camp, the Schelling story is dozen professors headed by Nobel Prize-winning evidence of what sets Kissinger apart from his economist Thomas Schelling flew down to peers: the bombing and invasion of neutral Washington, D.C., where they took turns venting Cambodia was more cynical, more ruthless, outrage and excoriating their old friend. and more inhumane than other bombings and Ferguson and Grandin agree that this episode invasions that came before, and the outrage is revealing, and revealing it is, for their sharply that Schelling and his colleagues brought to the contrasting uses of the story lay bare much about meeting underscores how far beyond the pale the assumptions and methods that underpin Kissinger had stepped.1 their two books, as well as about the battle tactics For Ferguson, presumptive leader of the in what we might call the “Kissinger wars”: Kissinger-as-heroic-statesman forces, the story the high-stakes contest over how to appraise illustrates Kissinger’s uniqueness—but this lies in 16 The American Historian | November 2016 Ferguson detects similarities in sensibility between Kissinger and Bob Dylan. Grandin finds them between Kissinger and Pol Pot. the vitriol he provokes, not in policies about Kissinger’s pernicious legacy In Ferguson’s view, before Kissinger that were no more brutal or cynical since leaving office in 1977— joined the administration of Richard than those of his predecessors. In thus the title, Kissinger’s Shadow: M. Nixon he was an intellectual Ferguson’s hands the Schelling story The Long Reach of America’s Most giant whose thinking was shaped by helps explain the caustic criticism Controversial Statesman. Ferguson is idealism, a label that has the effect hurled at Kissinger. The professors a leading conservative cheerleader for of softening and humanizing a man may have had “cogent reasons” for American empire and an authorized usually depicted as a cold-hearted, their anger, Ferguson acknowledges, biographer who has been friends with calculating realist. Grandin’s but too many of them were insiders his subject for more than a decade. argument is that Kissinger was an who had played their own roles in the Grandin is a leftist anti-imperialist intellectual giant in the sense that his Vietnam War for the encounter not to who has long seen Kissinger as an pernicious policies and philosophy look like “staged…self-exculpation” unmitigated disaster for U.S. foreign have exerted a magnetic effect on by men hoping, in part, that their policy. Ferguson wrote his book subsequent policymakers, pulling public stand might appease the because Kissinger convinced him to the country into ever-more noxious insurgent undergrads threatening do it and because he was enraptured imperial adventures. Each author to trash their elegant, wood-paneled by his first taste of the documents. is keenly aware of his place in the offices.2 Grandin says the trigger for writing Kissinger wars, and each attempts Here are two irreconcilable views his book was being “dr[i]v[en] … over preemptive defense. Although the two of why Kissinger attracts so much the edge” by an April 2014 photo of books appeared at nearly the same condemnation: Grandin tells us we erstwhile antigenocide champion time, they so often aptly summarize need look no further than Kissinger’s Samantha Power buddying up to the other side’s claims that the authors actions, to which Schelling and other Kissinger at a baseball game (though almost appear to be in dialogue. Yet critics reacted in “commonsensical” the book also builds on years of it remains a dialogue of the deaf, for ways. Ferguson suggests the impulse writing about U.S. imperialism in each author seems insensible to his to outrage is rooted not so much Latin America). Ferguson looks own double standards and flaws in in what Kissinger did than in around and sees a world that is reasoning. Examples of attacks failing the psychology of the critics: the “markedly more peaceful,” and he to hit targets abound. bitterness of bureaucratic antagonists, credits Kissinger with helping to Ferguson argues that the charges the envy of intellectual rivals, and the build it. Grandin looks around and of critics such as Grandin need to pathologies of the American left.3 sees endless war, and he blames be weighed against the presumed At first glance the two books Kissinger for helping to propagate benefits. “Arguments that focus on seem to have no common ground. it. Ferguson detects similarities in loss of life in strategically marginal Ferguson’s Kissinger, Volume I: sensibility between Kissinger and Bob countries—and there is no other way 1923–1968: The Idealist is the Dylan. Grandin finds them between of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, first installment in a two-volume Kissinger and Pol Pot.4 Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East biography. Although it clocks in at Yet the books align in surprising Timor,” Ferguson writes, “must be nearly one thousand pages, it takes ways. The authors share a vision of tested against this question: how, Kissinger’s life story only up until he Kissinger as a “great man,” a colossus in each case, would an alternative joined the Nixon administration in bestride U.S. foreign policy. But like decision have affected U.S. relations 1969. Grandin’s book is an extended a yin-yang symbol, one version is with strategically important countries essay framed around an argument painted white and the other black. like the Soviet Union, China, and November 2016 | The American Historian 17 the major Western powers.” Grandin policies warded off worse evils. But description of his central argument, scoffs at such reasoning; in one Grandin’s rejection of counterfactuals given how little it rests on delineating section, he argues: “Guardians of (which comes in a discussion of actual (as opposed to presumed) lines Kissinger’s legacy say his accusers Kissinger’s backchannel to Nixon of influence. All historical explanation misread or overstate the importance about the 1968 Vietnam peace talks) is at least implicitly a reckoning with of [evidence]…[offering] excuses [that is enmeshed in a double standard: in what might have been, and all sides in suggest] truth is not found in ‘the his own discussion of this episode, the Kissinger wars need to weigh the facts of history’ but from a ‘construct’ he jumps to a counterfactual (with a effects of Kissinger’s interventions by of hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and Vietnam deal, Hubert “Humphrey considering alternative scenarios. conjectures.”5 might have” won) and a conjecture Ferguson decries the “double There are hints already that (Kissinger “had to have been winging standard” that animates Kissinger’s Ferguson, a proponent of it”) within pages of condemning foes, who do not acknowledge that counterfactual history, will find in these methods.6 One might even other administrations have also volume two that Kissinger’s costly apply “construct of conjectures” as a committed what could be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity. Grandin’s book fits this bill, for his case is fundamentally ahistorical: that Kissinger’s policies were exceptional is the starting point, not the object of argumentation. Although Grandin is a Latin Americanist intimately familiar with the long tradition of sending in the Marines to “stabilize” the region, he does not situate Kissinger within a longer history of militarism and interventionism. The formulations in Kissinger’s Shadow that distinguish Kissinger from his predecessors are frustratingly vague: “to a greater extent than…in the past”; Kissinger “raised the stakes”; “the totality of [Kissinger’s] vision set him apart.” The links between Kissinger and the heightened militarism and secrecy that followed are equally imprecise: Kissinger “played a key role”; “provided the blueprint”; “created the conditions”; “shed[s] spectral light” on the road to today.7 Henry Kissinger has long been a polarizing figure. But how can two prominent historians come to such disparate conclusions about Kissinger while using the same evidence to support their respective arguments? COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 18 The American Historian | November 2016 Although Grandin offers “not very useful” effort to paint claims, has been simply to write what penetrating insights about Kissinger’s Kissinger as a war criminal in his the documents revealed, in Rankean fateful craving to be a man of action, famous 2001 polemic, The Trial of fashion: wie es eigentlich gewesen, the methodology underpinning the Henry Kissinger.9 But what works or “as it actually was,” as Ferguson main argument about the man’s most effectively in Kissinger’s Shadow translates it. It is the same method influence resembles collage: clip is the ramped-up version of Hitchens’s he said he used in his uniformly and juxtapose. Tangible evidence effort: Grandin’s book is more celebrated study of the Rothschilds.11 of influence is almost entirely comprehensive in coverage, better It’s a wildly unfashionable pretension absent. Kissinger offered expansive researched (though as an extended in an era when we take it for granted justifications for aggressive war. essay its research is selective rather that we bring unavoidable biases, Obama does, too. In a particularly than thorough), and often searing assumptions, and life experiences to unpersuasive example, Grandin in its relentless chronicling of the our reading of the documents and argues that Kissinger’s belief that horrors visited on the luckless Third to when and how we find meaning policymakers must act in the face World peoples who ended up on the in them.
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