Posted Monday morning, August 22, 2020.
American G.I.’s with German children at the end of World War II. The soldier on the right, in the shadows where he always liked to operate, is Private Henry Kissinger.
In contrast to so many Americans, Kissinger has lived without hope, without expectations, and certainly without confidence in either the workings of democracy or the inevitability of progress. Policy, he has argued, must start from this grim vantage point. This is not a heartwarming perspective, but is there anyone looking out at the world today who would say that his pessimism is not a more sensible foundation for foreign policy than...optimism? That is why, given the current state of international relations, it is foolish, even dangerous, to ignore him. The lessons he has been trying to teach may not be to the liking of most people, but they are more important than ever before. ---from the introduction of “The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World” by Barry Gewen.
Why do I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger?
I don’t mean “Why would I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger” as if I’m responding to a publisher’s come on or an overly enthusiastic headline on a review. I mean, plainly, why do I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger, because I do---specifically, “The Inevitability of Tragedy” by Barry Gwenn. It’s not just that this review by Thomas Meaney in the New Yorker makes it sound like an interesting and well-written book. Meaney’s review made me realize I don’t really know much about Kissinger.
Of course I know who he was and what he did. But I don’t know what made him the person he was. He seemed to have sprung, a fully formed monster, onto the national stage when I was in junior high, and stayed there until I graduated from college, despicable until the end. And all I cared to know about him and needed to know was that he was directly and purposefully responsible for the deaths of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of human beings. I knew, or, actually learned as time went on, that he was a Harvard professor, an expert on foreign policy, with a reputation for the brilliance of his scholarship and thinking. And I got a kick out of it when a friend who knew about this stuff told me that he was the model for Peter Sellers’ portrayal of Doctor Strangelove, even though Kissinger was not a former Nazi, just the opposite, in fact, a Jew who served in the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II and took part in the liberation of a concentration camp. But I don’t think I ever seriously thought about how he thought and wrote his way into becoming a monster and the architect and chief henchman of Nixon’s policy of mass murder in Southeast Asia and South America. How that happened, how Kissinger became Kissinger is something I want to know----something I should know. Something I think we all need to know, particularly political journalists.
I think he’s worth knowing as a villain and not simply a monster because villains are interesting in their villainy and because this one got away with it. He not only got away with it. He’s still celebrated for it. Hillary Clinton bragged about her friendship with him when she was running for President, for crying out loud!
I’ve written and tweeted many times that the wonder isn’t that we elected a Donald Trump president; the wonder is we didn’t do it sooner. I think the trouble the political media had---and to a degree still has--covering Trump as the villain and monster he is, is they couldn’t get their collective heads around the fact that a villain and monster like him could get himself elected to any office, let alone the presidency, despite the many examples of villains and monsters who have risen to the top in any and every industry, including journalism. It’s as if they believe that Nixon was a one-off in the whole of American history. Kissinger is just one of the most egregious specimens.
So I just checked “The Inevitability of Tragedy” out of the library, and it’s gone right on top of the stack of the fifty-four books I’m convinced I’m going to read by the end of the week.
But as much as I’m looking forward to reading Gewen’s biography, I’m eager to read the as yet unwritten novel by whoever out there is the contemporary equivalent of Gore Vidal and who would limit their story to Kissinger’s experience as a young soldier and build it around his friendship with this character...
In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Kraemer, a German-American private fifteen years his senior, whom Kissinger would call “the greatest single influence on my formative years.” A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.”
Kraemer sounds like a real-life Baron Munchusaen who may have embellished here and there but didn’t exaggerate to the point of telling fantastical lies, just enough to make him an unreliable narrator. Which would make him an interesting choice for narrator of young Kissinger’s story, although, probably because I’ve been reading “Burr”, I imagine Kissinger doing the narrating.
But the model doesn’t have to be Vidal. Conrad, Dostoevsky, Graham Greene---all good models. It’s just that, like I said, I have Vidal on my mind. And now that I think of it, I’m surprised Vidal didn’t write the novel himself and I’m irrationally disappointed he didn’t. It would have made a perfect cap to the “Narratives of Empire”.
Maybe I should write it myself?
First I have to do the research and get a lot smarter.
In the meantime, here’s more from Gewen’s introduction to “The Inevitability of Tragedy”...
In the 40 years since left government service, Kissinger has devoted himself largely to two goals: the burnishing of his reputation and instructing the American people in the principles of Realpolitik. The first of these has provoked intense controversy with detractors and admirers lining up on either side...The second, while it has not been ignored, has hardly elicited the kind of thoughtful discussion it deserve, and the reason for this, I would say, is that Kissingers’s thinking runs counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe. He challenges people to rethink their assumptions. Kissinger’s lessons about history, power, and democracy can be discomfiting, even painful, for those who insist that freedom and democracy are the aspirations of people everywhere or that America is some kind of moral beacon. To argue otherwise is to be, well, un-American.
...
Kissinger...learned from his personal experience, but the lessons he drew are [dark]...As an eyewitness to the rise of the Nazis to whom he lost many members of his family, he saw that democracy was not a universal desire and that, under certain circumstances, it woulc lead to the worst tyranny imaginable. Sometimes, when people “seize their rights,” they do so in order to deprive other people of their rights. Whereas [Condoleeza Rice, for example, as she writes in her book “Democracy”], understands human history as moving in a forward direction with transcendent meaning, for Kissinger history is more like one damned thing after another, unpredictable and uncontrollable; the basis of foreign policy has to be a pursuit of the national interest because, in an uncertain world, that is the anchor of stability. When correctly conceived, it contributes to rational relations among nations, giving them a shared foundation for working out their antagonisms; everyone understands where everyone else is coming from. World order is an end in its own right, and those Americans who insist on trying to impose their democratic values on others are likely to be disrupters of the peace, hegemonists by another name, or in Kissinger’s language, “crusaders.” One can’t expect too much in foreign affairs. The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one---namely, not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avert disaster. This is a perspective shaped by pessimism and a dim view of humanity.
Bush the Younger originally proposed Kissinger to be head of the 911 Commission of Inquiry, or whatever it was called, before public outrage stopped the appointment.
I wonder if the biography grapples with the question of why people like Kissinger insist they are just a product of history and they refuse to accept their own responsibility for making it. Any why it is that conservative leaders like Nixon gravitate to the "dark side" when they are looking for advice, instead of finding people with a positive or uplifting vision. We saw the same syndrome with Bush and Cheney, again with hundreds of thousands dead as a result. Now we see Trump, who could be described as Nixon without his brains, gravitating toward Stephen Miller, who might be Kissinger without HIS brains. And in the end, maybe that's just as well - with any luck, the world will escape Trump with only a couple of hundred thousand extra dead, instead of millions.
Posted by: Cathie from Canada | Monday, August 24, 2020 at 12:40 PM