Philip Rubenstein
How Should We Remember Henry Kissinger?

Philip Rubenstein | How Should We Remember Henry Kissinger? | 05.21.24

- Hello. Welcome. And I hope everyone is well and in good health. Today we’re talking about Henry Kissinger and the title of this talk is, which is a question, is “How should We Remember Henry Kissinger?” 1969 Until 1973, the Armed Forces of the United States undertook a sustained bombing campaign over large swaths of Cambodia. The reason to target Cambodia is that it had become a sanctuary for communist insurgents from South Vietnam, so that’s the Viet Cong, as they were known, as well as North Vietnamese soldiers. It’s estimated that 500,000 tonnes of US ordinance was dropped on Cambodia during those four years. Now, let me just put that into perspective, Cambodia, for those of you who are in the US, Cambodia’s about the size of Missouri. For those of you who were in the UK, if you imagine England and Wales together, not Scotland, just England and Wales, that’s about the size of Cambodia.

So that’s a sustained campaign over four years. And the tonnage of bombs that was dropped over that period was greater than the total tonnage that the allies dropped over the entirety of World War II. We don’t know the exact casualty numbers over that period. The persistent bombings are known to have killed at least 50,000 civilians possibly, possibly up to 150,000. There was one area in Cambodia that was known to have sizable concentrations of civilians, and in those four years, it was bombed 250 times. This campaign was a key part of Richard Nixon’s strategy on taking office for a surge in the war in the Vietnam War. And it was designed to escalate in order to strengthen America’s hand in the fourth wing Paris peace negotiations. So the idea for the carpet bombing of Cambodia was Nixon’s, but the execution of the campaign was overseen by Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.

And according to documents that were declassified much later, Henry Kissinger personally approved every single one of the 3,875 bombing sorties over Cambodia. So this is the story of, I mean, a remarkable individual, Henry Kissinger. And let’s just get this up. A man who, of course we all know, died very recently, only back in November of last year at the grand old age of 100. And the thing about Kissinger, he’s one of those people about whom everyone seems to have an opinion, and he seems to polarise people. Some of you will have met him, and particularly those of you who live or work in New York, where he was very much a fixture. And if you did, I hope that if it’s not confidential, that you’ll perhaps share some of your stories in the chat, which we can look at later. What’s surprising about Kissinger is just how much he actually accomplished in power, given that his time in office was relatively short, and it was eight years, so it was the length of two presidents.

He was appointed at Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1969. Then when Nixon was reelected, he was then appointed Secretary of State as well as retaining his title as National Security Advisor. So very unusual to hold both roles. And then when Nixon had to resign after Watergate, he was reappointed as Secretary of State by the new president, Gerald Ford, which was a role that he held until Jimmy Carter was elected in 1977. On leaving office, he spent the next 47 years as a highly paid foreign policy consultant, which was a kind of a role he invented for himself, as well as being a media pundit and author of several books and confidant to many world leaders. So 47 years after he left office, I mean, that’s a long time, that’s two generations.

But his legacy, it’s amazing. I mean, it continues to be contested. And you know, you can see from the headlines for his obituaries, he’s revered, but he’s reviled, he’s admired, and he’s detested pushed much in equal measure. Just take a look at some of these headlines. So in the middle at the bottom, we have the Rolling Stone head, which was published barely a few minutes after the announcement of his death, “Henry Kissinger, War criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.” And in the HuffPost, much shorter one, just simply “The Beltway Butcher.” And you can see other of these headlines, laud him as international statesman and a former Nobel Peace Prize winner. Both the supporters and the detractors of Kissinger see him as the ultimate proponent of realpolitik. And we’re going to dive into that one a bit later. So what does that mean?

I mean, for supporters, they see that that means, he was a kind of an energetic steward of the national interest, who understood the true nature of just how the world works. But for his detractors, for them, realpolitik means he’s an unprincipled champion of high power politics who constantly justifies the very worst excesses of politics. Though, in this next hour, we’re going to be looking at Kissinger’s background. We’re going to be looking at his views, his record in office, and we’re going to ask, was he a hero? Was he a monster? Was he both? And ultimately, you are going to be the judge. So in the same way, for those of you who saw Williams recent talk on Nixon, which I think it was called “Nixon the Bad Boy,” where he explored his reputation for good and bad. This talk goes largely in parallel because so much of what Kissinger did in office, he did in partnership with Nixon.

So let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Here he is as a young fellow, Heinz Alfred Kissinger. That’s what he was born. And he’s born, as you can see, in Fürth in Germany. Fürth is a city in Northern Bavaria, and if you look on the map, you can see it’s not too far northwest of Nuremberg. And it had been a centre for Jewish learning for some 300 years. And the Young Heights, as he was, was brought up as a practising Orthodox Jew in an Orthodox family. His father is Louis, and his father’s a teacher. He, by all accounts, he’s a studious and very proper man, very decent man. He’s an Orthodox Jew. And in his politics, he’s a patriotic German, and he’s conservative, small C, conservative. The family’s original name had been Löb, but Heinz’s great-great-grandfather, a century earlier had visited a spa town called Bad Kissingen, and he decided that he was going to adopt the name Kissinger as the family’s surname, because it sounded more German.

As a boy, Heinz’s great love wasn’t politics or international relations, his great love was football or soccer as it’s known in the US. And he loved playing the game, and he loved watching the game. He was apparently a rather a competitive boy. So even though he was fairly small in stature, and he was slight, and he wasn’t exceptionally good at the game, he loved it, and he loved to win. He’d often play in the yard behind the family’s house with his cousin, who was living with him at the time. And when they were called in for dinner in the evening, the legend is that if Heinz was ahead, he’d let his cousin go in, but if he was losing, the cousin would’ve to keep playing until Heinz could catch up.

So that just gives you a little early indication of what we’re going to see in the future, just that competitive ambitious element. He adored going to soccer games, but after the Nuremberg laws were passed in 1935, Jews were forbidden from going to matches. He was, as I said, smaller than most the kids around him, but it didn’t stop him having a go anyway. And so he would occasionally take on a fake identity, so he wouldn’t have any markings that he was Jewish in his fake papers, and he’d try and sneak into the games, but more often than not, he was discovered and he’d get beaten up. So in his early experiences, he’s being beaten up regularly as a Jew. Kissinger was the product of both of his parents. I’ve talked about Louie a little, Louie’s intellectual, he’s patriotic, he’s a teacher. He’s a little allude. His mother Paula is exactly the opposite. And her intelligence isn’t an academic intelligence. It’s a street smart intelligence.

Here she is many years later in 1973, while her son is swearing in ceremony as Secretary of State. And you can see she’s there holding a bible. Paula is sharp, she’s witty, she’s earthy, she’s highly practical, and she’s the family decision maker. So it’s so interesting, isn’t it? I mean, you can see both, you can see both Louis, the academic, ponderous, thoughtful, decent, patriotic. You can see him in Kissinger. And you can also see the mother as well, highly practical, very sharp, acerbic wit, you can see both of them in the product of the adult. If it had been left up to Louis, it is very likely that the family would’ve stayed in Germany and along with their extended family, all the cousins that they would’ve perished. And even though he’d been fired from his job as a teacher under the Nuremberg Laws, and he was subject as everyone else was to the restrictions, he still probably would’ve stayed. But Paula was much cannier and she could see the writing on the wall.

And in 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht, she made sure that Louis, Paula, Heinz and his younger brother David, all would say their final goodbyes to the rest of the family in Germany. And they made their way via London to the United States of America. Paula is actually the person, the one person who’s credited by Kissinger as the most important person in his life. So it’s, you know, I love this photo because here she is, she’s not holding any old Bible, she’s actually holding a King James Bible. And this is a gift from Nixon to Kissinger for the swearing in ceremony. And if you look at her carefully, you can’t quite tell if she’s looking at him with just pure Jewish mother adoration or if she’s noticed a smudge on his glasses and she’s trying to suppress a desperate urge to wipe it off. It’s a great photo.

The Kissinger family arrive in New York in 1938, and they settle in Washington Heights, so in the north part of Manhattan. And by then, the area has become home to a sizable population of German Jewish refugees. So they fit in very nicely there. And this is when Heinz, who’s now 15 years old, this is when he decides he’s going to Americanize his name and he’s going to change his name to Henry. He applies himself to its studies, as you would expect. But unfortunately, the family has got no money. They’re completely impoverished. So after his first year at high school, he’s compelled to take a full-time job in a shaving brush factory. He still manages to complete his education, which he does at night school. And then he goes on to college where he studies accounting. So we’re now going to see a short clip from an interview on 60 Minutes with the interviewer Lesley Stahl, who did a number of interviews with Kissinger over the years. And we’re going to hear him talking about those early days in America.

[Clip plays]

• When I came to the United States, I was 15 years old and we had three rooms, and we had two people in each room. So you probably know some of these conditions.

• This is where you lived, this is the apartment you moved into very soon after you got to the United States.

• In 1938.

• Your mother?

• My mother would never leave it.

• [Lesley] His father had been a teacher, but he says his mother was the most important person in his life. A couple of years ago, she fell and went into a coma.

• Yes. In fact, they wanted to cut off her life support system.

• [Lesley] But Kissinger wouldn’t let them, telling the doctors, “You don’t know my mother.” And sure enough.

• Three days later, she came through and she had a respirator down her throat, so she couldn’t talk, so she wrote, where am I? We told her. What day is it? We told her. What time is it? And she wrote, I have a dental appointment at 11, and if you don’t cancel it, I’ll have to pay for it.

• Mom’s back.

• She was back.

• Well, you said once that everything that you achieved, you owed to your mother.

• Well, I achieved it to my life to her because she made us come here, she made us emigrate.

• [Lesley] He immigrated with his parents and brother to America in 1938 as Heinz Kissinger, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. When you were a young man, a young boy in Germany, kids often beat you up walking down the street, then you move here into this neighbourhood. What was that like, that change?

• Well, at first, when I saw children come towards me, other children, I’d cross the street

• Afraid they were going to beat you up. Exactly. And then I suddenly realised, this is America. This won’t happen to you.

[Clip ends]

• So a very interesting clip, I think, and a lot of information in that clip. I mean, we get a little sense at the beginning about the families impoverished conditions when they come to the US. He tells the wonderful story about his mother. So we just start to get a sense of who she is and her formidable character. And then he ends with that story that he realises he doesn’t have to cross the street because this is America. He arrives, as I say, in 1938, but it’s really only in 1943 that Kissinger starts to feel that he is in America. And that’s because 43 is the year that he’s drafted. And you can see him on, obviously with his glasses as the soldier on the right in this photo, which is taken in Germany just after the war, and he’s looking after some German kids. During the war, he obtains his US citizenship, and after about of basic training in Louisiana, he shipped over to Europe and he sees combat in the Battle of the Bulge.

In the aftermath of World War II, he returns to his homeland to Germany, where he works in counterintelligence operations, and his job is to round up and arrest Gestapo members and he’s successful. And so for this work, he is awarded the Bronze star, and he’s extremely proud of that. So he’s now in his early 20s, and he’s coming to the end of the army, and as I say, he really starts to feel like an American. One of his army comrades at the time, says of him during that time quote, “He was more American than I have ever seen any American.” You know, kind of a typical refugee, more American than American. Before he comes back to the US, there’s one more experience he’s going to have, which sees him for the rest of his life. In April, 1945, shortly before the the end of World War II, he participates in the liberation of Hannover-Ahlem, which is a sub camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, which is located just outside Hamburg.

The camp had held a broad mixture of political prisoners of so-called socials, and of course, of Jews as well. And what’s interesting is that for most of his life, really until much, much later in life, Kissinger was very silent about this experience and the impact of experience. But at the time, he actually writes in his private journal, “I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Harlem. They barely looked human, they were skeletons.” So this brings us to the inevitable question of Kissinger’s Jewishness. And the answer to the question, as with most things, Kissinger is, it’s complicated. Henry Kissinger decides in his 20s, he’s going to renounce his orthodoxy, and with it, he’s also going to renounce any overt attachment to his Judaism. Now, bear in mind that this is someone who, in his youth, when he was in Germany with his family, he went to the synagogue every day, every morning before school. He purportedly used to have regular Torah discussions with his father’s friends, which he enjoyed. And he even briefly studied at the Jewish Seminary in Würzburg which was not far from Fürth.

So this is a big ring that he’s making. And most of his public comments that we have about his Jewishness are in the negative. In the 1970s, he tells a friend that Judaism has no significance for me. On one other occasion, he quips, if you can call it a quip, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” Or much of his life, particularly when he was in office, he would minimise his Jewish heritage. When asked about his childhood, for example, he described it as typical middle class German, and he rarely spoke about the day-to-day persecution or beatings that he received as a Jew.

He always played down his Jewishness while he was in office, partly because he wanted to please Nixon. And Nixon is also a very complicated figure, but a man who surrounded himself with this incultury of Californian antisemitic cronies, but also I think because he felt it interfered with his job as America’s chief diplomat, he found it an encumbrance. He wanted to be seen as American and not have anything interfere with that, not have any other interest interfere with it. There’s a famous confrontation that he has with Golda Meir, where Meir, during the ‘73 war is pleading with Henry to help Israel in its hour of need as a Jew. And he explains to her that he’s an American first. And for those of you who’ve seen the recent movie “Golda” with Helen Mirren and Kissinger played by Liev Schreiber, you’ll have seen this scene, but I just wanted to show it. It’s fairly short. And it’s a great scene. And Golda Meir’s reply is absolutely priceless.

[Clip plays]

• In my day, they stood for the Prime Minister.

• Secretary Kissinger is on the line.

• [Kissinger] Remember that I am first an American, second, I’m Secretary of State, and third, I am a Jew.

• You forget that in Israel, we read from right to left.

[Clip ends]

• So there you go. Big lesson when it comes to Jewish identity. You never mess with Golda Meir. As Secretary of States, though, you know, it’s so complicated. It’s so jarred. Kissinger, you know, he does more than play his Jewishness. He just goes out of his way to remove any taint from his person. One of his first actions when he’s appointed to the office is that he revokes the policy of allowing Jewish employees in the State Department to take Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as holiday. I mean, that’s very strange behaviour. And there’s a taped conversation that was published after Nixon left office. It’s 1973, and there’s a conversation in the Oval Office between Kissinger and Nixon about how they should respond to pressure coming from the Jewish community about persecuted Soviet Jews.

And this is what Kissinger says. “The immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it’s not an American concern, maybe a humanitarian concern.” Now, even for Kissinger’s dark wit, there’s something deeply troubling and deeply disturbing about the language he’s using there. Of course, the great irony is that you only have to listen. You only have to listen to, sorry my 13-year-old interrupting. You only have to listen to Henry Kissinger, to hear him speak and the sound of that voice, you know, the worldliness, that talmudic mind that can twist and turn, you know, that dark wit to realise whatever he says, he can’t help sounding like a Jew.

So he plays his Jewishness down in part to fuel his ambition. But in the same vein of ambition, in his early days as he’s building his career, he also latches on to a series of mentors. Each one of whom has a seniority to him in years, he has experience that he doesn’t have and can give him access and insight to advance his career. The first of these mentors is a remarkable man by the name of Fritz Kraemer. And Kissinger meets him when he’s doing his army training. One day, this extraordinary crushing character steps out of a jeep. He’s wearing a monocle, he’s carrying a walking stick, and he’s there to lecture the troops about why they’re off to fight Nazi Germany. So it’s a motivational lecture. And Kissinger is deeply impressed with his intelligence, with the way he does it. And so he writes to him and Kraemer adopts him.

The two of them become close very, very quickly. Kraemer is 15 years his senior, and he’s actually later going to become a really important voice on the right. He’ll be a major influence 20 years, 30 years hence on the development of neoconservative thinking in the Republican party. But meanwhile, Kraemer takes a shine to Kissinger, and he gives him a big piece of advice. He says, “When the war is over and you leave the army, there’s only one place for a gentleman to study, and that is Harvard.” Thanks to the GI Bill, Kissinger is able to apply to Harvard. He wins admission, and he graduates in history. Summa cum laude in 1950. So here’s Kissinger in the front row of the faculty at the Centre of International Affairs, which he joins. And before he does so, it’s worth just noting that as an undergraduate, you have to do a thesis. And he writes a thesis, which is, wait for it, 400 pages long.

And as a result, Harvard introduces a rule that no undergraduate thesis from then on is ever allowed to exceed 35,000 words. And as I understand it, the rule is still in existence, but it was put in place after they received Kissinger’s thesis. The man who has the greatest influence within the second of his mentors is this man pictured on the right here, William Yendell Elliot. And he studies under Elliot, who’s apparently this kind of larger than life character who is professor of government, and he’s also known as Wild Bill. So that can gives you some sense of who the man is. Elliot supervises Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation, and the subject of his doctorate is really significant because it’s the history of the power play between European states in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

So during the course of his doctorate, he’s engrossing himself in the art of statecraft. He’s learning about the balance of power practised by all the key players at the time, people like Castlereagh and Talleyrand, and above all the man who he considers to be the master of the great game of diplomacy, and that’s Metternich. So Kissinger spends the next 20 years of his career at Harvard where he’s teaching and through Elliot and others, he’s introduced to powerful people, and he becomes a fixture on the Washington DC foreign policy circuit. So he becomes a consultant to the National Security Council and the State Department and the Rand Corporation.

By the late 1950s, his name is starting to be known around town. So here we are, it’s almost the dawning of the new decade. It’s almost 1960. And this is when he meets his third mentor, the Republican governor of New York, and that’s Nelson Rockefeller, who’s in the picture, obviously that 75. So Rockefeller is 15 years older by then. Kissinger happens to be a registered Democrat at this point, but nevermind, Rockefeller’s a powerful man who can help him. And so he becomes Rockefeller’s foreign policy advisor, and he ends up supporting the governor’s free bids to become the Republican presidential nominee in 1960 and 1964 and finally 1968. Each of those bids fails. So it’s a great surprise when in 1968, the incoming president, Richard Milhous Nixon should appoint of all people, Henry Kissinger to be his national security advisor, a man who’s worked for a political rival who’s been on the other side of Republican politics right the way through the 1960s.

How is it that this guy who’s been associated with the other side for 10 years winds up as National security advisor to Richard Nixon? Well, a lot of people around Washington were asking the question at the same time. It seems that what happened is that during the Paris Peace talks on Vietnam, which had been faltering and had been conducted under LBJs presidency, Kissinger had attended towards the end as an observer. And he saw he, there was an opportunity when he realised which way the political wind was blowing. There was an opportunity to contact the Nixon campaign and give them his assessment of what was going on in Paris. And Nixon finds out he’s grateful, and even though he’s only met Kissinger only once, he decides to offer him the job. So for the next five years, Nixon and Kissinger form, the most extraordinary partnership, and it’s complex, it’s deeply psychological.

Both of them are dark, devious, secretive people. I mean, they really enjoy cutting the State Department out of the loop so that state doesn’t get any significant say in all of the major decisions that are going to be made, foreign policy decisions that are going to be made over the next five years. And they’re both deeply insecure and deeply paranoid. And their insecurities and their paranoia, they kind of feed each other. There’s a story that’s told by Winston Lord, who’s one of Kissinger’s aides at this time, and he says, Henry said to me, “I used to be paranoid at Harvard, but here in DC, it’s impossible to be paranoid.” And Lord didn’t really understand what he meant.

So he went to the dictionary and he looked up the word paranoia, and he sees that paranoia, it means the fear that everyone is out to get you. And he realises that Kissinger’s point is that in DC, it’s not the fear that everyone’s trying to get you, it’s the knowledge that they really are. And of course, that’s paranoid, right? That’s paranoia, that’s what it is. So they’re both really paranoid, they’re both really insecure. But Nixon and Kissinger, ultimately they work incredibly well together. And it’s because they share a fundamentally similar view of the world. And they each, although reluctantly, they each develop a great respect for each other’s capabilities. Kissinger respects Nixon for his, he thinks of his tremendous grasp of geopolitics and for his daring and risky ideas.

While Nixon respects Kissinger as a strategist and as a brilliant negotiator. Kissinger realises that Nixon is a tricky character, and he’s highly sensitive and edgy, and he’s got a very brittle ego. And what he’s able to do, and the reason why he’s able to get so close to him is because he understands how to handle his boss. He realises that Nixon needs to be seen as someone who has great strategic ideas, who hates to be told he’s wrong, and who also hates to be put into a corner. So what Kissinger does is he just lets him talk and talk and talk. And then if he thinks the conversation is going in the wrong direction, he very gently and tentatively steers it away and says, “Oh, Mr. President, of course that’s right. But I wonder whether or not we shouldn’t also look at this.” And he gently brings Nixon away from the brink, and he brings him to other ideas, and he gets him to a point where Nixon believes in the idea and believes it’s his idea.

And then at that point, Kissinger just says, “Well, Mr. President, that’s a terrific idea.” And that’s how the relationship works. And you know, it’s instructive to look at this photo because this photo, when you first look at it, it looks like there’s two guys who are very relaxed with each other, but then you look really closely at Kissinger, yes, he’s got his land in his pocket, but he’s standing fairly taught and he’s poised, and you can see he’s wary and he’s just watching the boss like a hawk. And he’s anything but relaxed. So let’s listen to Kissinger in his own words, describing how things work with Nixon. And I’m not going to spoil this, but just watch out for the sting in the tail at the end of the clip.

[Clip plays]

• Richard Nixon. You write about Richard Nixon, that he was the most complex president of the 20th century,

• And I might throw in the 19th century too.

• What did you mean when you talked about the cult of the tough guy? You were describing a quality about him that disturbed you, I think.

• Well, I’m not sure whether Nixon by nature was a particularly tough person, but he felt the need to demonstrate to his friends that he really was tough.

• To demonstrate he was tough, Kissinger says, Nixon would issue wild orders and often denigrate his associates, even Kissinger. And who we learn in the tapes called my Jew boy.

• Well, but that’s another one of these things that if you knew Nixon, I don’t take all that seriously.

• Why not?

• It was showing off to his Orange County buddies.

• But when Nixon made impulsive decisions in foreign policy to show off his buddies, Kissinger says, “The staff learned to ignore the orders.”

• He was capable of firing off a whole string of orders, which in foreign policy, weren’t carried out.

• Were not carried out.

• Well, you knew when you worked with Nixon, what he meant.

• For example, in 1969, Kissinger called Nixon, who was with his friend Bebe Rebozo, to tell him of the hijacking of a TWA plane to Damascus, Syria. Kissinger writes, “To impress Rebozo, Nixon ordered the bombing of Damascus, and the Pentagon began moving ships into place.”

• And the next day, he didn’t want to hear of this anymore.

• Here’s the president of the United States issuing wild orders left and right.

• Not left and right. If you knew Nixon, you knew what orders to take seriously and what orders not to take seriously.

• That’s crazy.

• But he needs to be judged by the major decisions he took and those decisions he took very cautiously and with maddening deliberation.

• Kissinger thinks that this cult of the tough guy is what led to Watergate. That Nixon issued one of his exuberant orders and it was carried out.

• The essence of Watergate was best summed up for me by Bryce Harlow, who was a wise old man around Washington. And he said some fool went into the Oval Office and did what he was told.

[Clip ends]

• An extraordinary note that. I mean, the way that Kissinger can tune into Nixon’s wavelength that he knows when he’s showing off, he knows when he’s just being impulsive and he knows when he’s being deadly serious and maddeningly repetitive about it. And he can distinguish between all of them, and he can read the boss. And you wonder how many presidents have someone like that. And then that extraordinary final comment, you know, that Watergate happened because some fool did what he was told. And you know, it’s just possible. I mean, stranger things have happened in politics and history, haven’t they?

So, Kissinger, he eases into office and he becomes tremendously adept at public relations, at schmoozing reporters, at briefing reporters on background. And he enjoys an incredibly close relationship with a large number of reporters. And they all love his sharp wit at press conferences. And I just thought I’d just repeat three of Kissinger’s best. There’s this one. “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes, there’s too much fraternising with the enemy.” And then here’s one he says about Harvard. “The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.” And finally, he’s asked once about an imminent crisis. And this is what he says. This is my favourite quote of all. “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” So no surprise that by the early 1970s, he achieves celebrity status and the press attention on him is as much on the intrigue over his personal life as it is on his role in shaping American foreign policy. So he’s a man about town.

He’s constantly seen at parties premieres with glamorous actresses like Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine, particularly Jill St. John, and the press love him. And Newsweek on its front cover, they depict him as a superhero. You can see here they are declaring, “It’s super K!” And this image was in some ways to haunt him, particularly with Nixon. Everyone gets in on the act. And he’s on Saturday Night Live. John Belushi is regularly playing him. Woody Allen makes a film called “Harvey Wallinger,” not one of his best, I have to say, a short film, which is kind of purportedly the life of Henry Kissinger. I think probably the best spoof. My favourite is Monty Python who’s Eric Idle wrote this little ditty on Kissinger’s celebrity status. Here it is.

♪ Henry Kissinger ♪ ♪ How I’m missing yer ♪ ♪ You’re the Doctor of my dreams ♪ ♪ With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare ♪ ♪ And your machiavellian schemes ♪ ♪ I know they say that you are very vain and short ♪ ♪ And fat and pushy but at least you’re not insane ♪ ♪ Henry Kissinger ♪ ♪ How I’m missing yer ♪ ♪ And wishing you were here ♪

• That line, “At least you’re not insane,” something that would’ve been funny at the time. Something we really don’t take for granted anymore in politics, do we? So let’s talk about Kissinger’s reputation, and we’re going to start with the case that’s made by his accusers, who variously called him a liar, a war criminal, and a murderer. And if you had to sum up the case against Henry Kissinger, you would say it was in his performance, in his role as a kind of malignant henchman to Richard Nixon. There were three journalists who stand out as his accusers in chief. So they’re Seymour Hirsch, Christopher Hitchens, who wrote a book called “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” and finally William Shawcross, whose book “Sideshow” is all about the consequences of the bombing of Cambodia, which he links directly to the rise of the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

So we start with Cambodia, I mean, it’s clear that by 1969, Cambodia is no longer neutral. And that’s because it’s been dragged into the war by the North Vietnamese unwillingly. The country’s rulers have been between a rock and a hard place because they really don’t want to get involved. But very reluctantly, they’ve had to allow some of the areas in the east to be used by the North Vietnamese army as a base and also as a supply route for the Viet Cong. Now Nixon, remember at this time, he’s been betting on a strategy for a surge, right?

Resurge, this is his plan. He’s going to bomb Cambodia, he’s going to bomb Hanoi, he’s going to escalate the war, and he’s going to use all of this as leverage to win a better terms around the peace table in Paris. So that’s the plan. And you know what? If that sounds crazy, it’s exactly the same thing that the US did 30, 40 years later, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. And no one really learned from history because the consequences were fairly similar. So there’s a logic there to the bombing of Cambodia, and we’re going to hear what Kissinger himself says about it.

[Clip plays]

• There’s no judgments that were made.

• The secret bombing of Cambodia. Do you regret this today?

• No.

• After what happened in Cambodia?

• Well, what happened in Cambodia?

• What happened is that Nixon and Kissinger expanded the Vietnam War into neighbouring Cambodia to wipe out enemy sanctuaries. But the mission failed and the Cambodian government collapsed. Kissinger’s critics say that paved the way for Pol Pot and his slaughter of 1 million Cambodians.

• I do not accept the proposition that you can base four divisions on this all over country, kill 500 Americans a week, and that the United States cannot react to this because six years down the road, some intellectuals can construct a theory by which anything that happened after that date.

[Clip ends]

• So, he’s saying that, look, there are enemy bases that were killing our soldiers and you can’t blame us for the unforeseen consequences that then led to the horror part. And you can agree with that. But I think to a point, he’s certainly right about the enemy bases, but what he doesn’t address, and I’ve seen him talk about Cambodia in a number of interviews. He never addresses, I think the sheer scale and longevity of the campaign, 4,000 sorters over four years killing at least 50,000 people. So these were more than military targets. I mean, the effect of this was the devastation of a country. And now this is going to bring us to the prosecution of the Vietnam War itself. And this, I mean, most of you I’m sure will recognise, this is a famous iconic image from April, 1975, showing South Vietnamese officials and their families desperate to board one of the last American helicopters after the fall of Saigon.

And here again, we are faced with another highly polarised view of the role played by Nixon and Kissinger together because they pursue what they call an honourable peace. Certainly what in fact, what both of them call honourable peace. In other words, an end to the war that won’t make America look weak in the face of Chinese and Russian progression. So here’s the question, right? Are we to admire the two of them ending a war that they never started? Remember, Vietnam was a war begun by JFK, it was escalated by Lyndon Johnson, and it was only inherited by Nixon. So he ended the war along with Kissinger. Or are we to condemn them for cynically prolonging the war by four years with 20,000 more young American lives lost, with over a hundred thousand more Vietnamese and Cambodian lives lost for an agreement that was not so very different.

So the one that was on the table in 1969. There was a young foreign service official called John Negroponte, whose name might be familiar because he played a major diplomatic role in the Iraq conflict many years later. And he summed up what he thought was the result that was achieved by Nixon and Kissinger after all these four years, after the surge, after all these lost lives, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions, into accepting our concessions.” So in other words, he’s saying, was it worth it? I don’t think so. We should have committed to peace back in 1969. And I think this is going to, this is still going to be fought over by historians for the next 50 or so years. And I think it’s very hard to be definitive either way. Vietnam aside, one of the most controversial actions of Kissinger’s tenure in office was over Chile.

He worked alongside the CIA to destabilise the regime of the elected President Salvador Allende. Allende was a Marxist. He was elected in an open democratic election, and he was assassinated in 1973 as part of the military coup, which was tacitly supported by the US. And his replacement, as we know, was the repressive and murderous desperate Augusto Pinochet. Kissinger’s view is that the stability offered by a reliably anti-communist regime, no matter how barbarous, is preferable to the risk posed by a Marxist government in the heart of the western hemisphere. I mean, that’s his view, right? Now it’s true that, you know, the Cold War was still in full swing in the early 1970s, but it’s important to just remember that the Soviets had kind of withdrawn from Latin America after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they were no longer so focused on cultivating boxes in the region.

And, you know, Kissinger, Nixon also in those years, they threw Bangladesh under a bus because they were supporting the Pakistani strongman Yahya Khan at the time, they threw East Timor under a bus because in 1975 they were supporting Indonesia’s strongman, President Suharto. So if you were a small country and you were caught up in the crossfire, then chances are you weren’t going to fare very well under the Nixon-Kissinger eye. It is so interesting though that after all these years, Henry Kissinger is still such a hate figure by particularly the progressive left, and he’s seen as the lightning rod who represents all of these policies. And it does make you want to ask why more than any other Secretary of States is he singled out? Why is he singled out more than John Foster Dulles under Eisenhower who did much the same in terms of the overthrow of legitimate governments in Iran and Guatemala?

You know, why does Dean Rusk never get it in the net when he was Secretary of State when the Vietnam War started and continue to be prosecuted under Johnson. One of Kissinger’s biographers, Neil Ferguson thinks it may be something to do with the fact that Kissinger is Jewish. I have to say I don’t think so because I really don’t think the evidence is there. I think it’s much more likely that Kissinger was in office at a time when America was deeply, deeply divided when the counterculture was at its height. And he was so high profile, he was so much of a celebrity and he lived by the press. And not only that, but in unlike most secretaries of states who were seen as a servant of their master, he was very much seen as Nixon’s partner. And the cherry on the cake is that Henry Kissinger, not Richard Nixon, but Henry Kissinger was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam for their work on the Paris Peace Talks. And many of his opponents saw this as the absolute pinnacle of hypocrisy.

And you can see, here’s Tom Lehrer, the great satirist saying, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded Nobel Peace Prize.” So I’m conscious of the time, and I’m sorry again, once again, my time management has been, let’s call it substandard. But for those of you who were able to stay, I do want to move on to China. I reckon we’ve probably got another five to 10 minutes if you’re happy to bear with me, and then we’ll take some questions. But I want to focus on his achievements now and on the really indisputable achievements, because the achievements that there are are fairly mighty. And we’re going to look at the three biggest ones, which are all interlinked. And that is the engagement with China, the rapprochement with the Soviet Union and the first Arab-Israel Peace Treaty that was concluded after the Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel.

So we’re going to start with China. Now, the original idea to reach out to China comes not from Henry Kissinger, it actually comes from the man who’d made his name in politics as a commie-hating red-baiter. And of course, that’s Richard Nixon. Kissinger’s deputy in 1969 when he’s made National Security advisor is Al Haig. And you’ll remember the name Al Haig from the 1980s when he worked for Ronald Reagan. And Al Haig recalls in his memoirs that a few weeks into the new administration, Kissinger he comes out of a meeting with Nixon and he’s fuming and he says, “Our leaders take a leave of reality. He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with communist China. He’s just ordered me to make this flight of fancy come true.” And Haig says, “Kissinger, then grasps his head in his hands and he shouts China.”

Now the thing about Henry Kissinger is that until this moment, he’s always been focused on Europe, you know, it’s his personal background and his academic background. So he’s completely croned by his idea. It’s a shock to his system. But when he realises that Nixon is serious about China, and remember what he’d said in that clip, “I knew when he was serious.” When he realises he’s serious, Kissinger gets on board very quickly, and like the academic that he is, he starts to meet experts, he reads books. He just immerses himself in Chinese history, Chinese politics, and Chinese culture. And Kissinger is the one who makes the preparatory trip in 1971 and he meets with Zhou Enlai and this fantastic image here of the two of them sharing a banquet and Kissinger being taught how to use chopsticks.

And he’s there to build trust and pave the way for what’s going to become a groundbreaking summit between Nixon and Chairman Mao in 1972. The biggest obstacle that they have to overcome is Taiwan. And how do they do it? Well, this is just vintage Kissinger because the two countries career policy of what since become known as quote, “Strategic ambiguity,” that is, we, the US are going to agree that we are not going to formally recognise Taiwan as an independent state. And you, China will agree you are not going to march in and you’ll allow us to tacitly support Taiwan’s capacity to defend itself. Now, that’s an incredibly delicate balance. And what’s amazing, really amazing is that that balance has lasted virtually intact for 50 years. It has, of course, been very severely tested over the last decade or so, but it still lasted. And that’s quite some achievement. Nixon and Mao meet in 1972, and the result is that 23 years of diplomatic isolation and mutual hostility and formal relations between the two countries open up.

Now, that’s not the genius of the opening to China. The real genius of the opening to China is that it was also designed to create a wedge between the two most powerful communist countries in the world that is between China and the Soviet Union. Because in bringing in China from the cold, what Kissinger and Nixon and later Ford actually do is that they create a triangular relationship between their two biggest foes. And they stoke Moscow’s deepest, deepest fears, the threat not from one front now, but two fronts, from China in the east and from NATO in the west. And this is what creates the right environment for Kissinger to accelerate a project of détente with the USSR. Amazingly, within weeks of Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, Leonid Brezhnev invites the United States president to a summit. And this leads to what we know as détente and the whole détente process with the Soviet Union, which is characterised over the rest of the 1970s by arms reduction deals, trade deals, and cultural exchanges.

So what happened here, and this is so important, what happened here is that the Chinese and the Soviets both bought into the idea of a shared international system, and they bought into it because they could see how it would benefit them and how staying out of it be to their disadvantage. And of course, you can’t help but think that this contrasts so much with maligned state players in today’s world such as Russia in Iran, who increasingly don’t buy into the international system and increasingly are doing everything they can to undermine it, which is one of the great dangers and risks of the global politics today. So this was the vision of Nixon and Kissinger. It was to bind their enemies into a shared system. And it’s so easy to forget. Some courage it took on both of their parts to engage with China and the Soviets in the 1970s, particularly for Nixon, you know, the hawkish wing of the Republican party figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

They were highly critical at the time, but Nixon and Kissinger, they persevered. So I just, I’m going to be quite brief now talking about the Middle East just because of time. I mean, Kissinger’s a brilliant negotiator and he invents shuttle diplomacy through all of the trips that he takes, particularly going backwards and forwards and over and through in the Middle East during the 1970s. And his role in the Yom Kippur War is quite significant because its Kissinger’s view, quite controversially that there can only be peace that the region of Israel is brought down a pebble too, and Egypt can emerge from the war with some of its pride restored. So what does he do? He plays both sides. He refuses to allow Israel to preemptively strike Egypt and Syria in 1973. And this is hugely frustrating to Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir. And during the war itself, he deliberately delays the supply of arms to Israel because while he didn’t want Israel to lose, he also didn’t want Israel to win big.

And he felt that if Israel won big, that the Egyptians would have a bloody nose and they would never agree to any negotiations. They needed to be able to hold their heads high. So what he aimed for, and he arguably helped achieve, was this psychological balance between Israel and Egypt that he thought was essential to create the conditions for the two sides to come together, negotiate successfully, and eventually sign the first ever peace treaty between an Arab country and Israel. This was a high stakes, high risk game. And let’s not forget, it came with the cost of many, many lives and tensions. He and Golda Meir had a difficult relationship. He did not liked meeting Golda. He dreaded meeting Golda. And I put this photo up because it wasn’t taken by an official photographer, and I think it’s a tremendous photo, and you can just imagine that he knows that Golda is just about to start a meeting with him by giving him a lecture on his duty as a Jew to the Jewish people. And he’s just dreading it.

He knows what he’s going to get, and he’s just absolutely dreading what’s about to come. The other thing he achieves from an American standpoint is he does something extraordinary because by getting close to Sadat, he also gets rid of the Soviets from Egypt and from any real influence in the Middle East. And he does it in the most extraordinary way that you can’t imagine a Secretary of State ever being able to do in these days. This is at a time in '73 when Nixon is pretty much out of it, he’s consumed by Watergate and he’s out of the loop and Kissinger on his own, unilaterally takes the nuclear war level up to DefCon 3. And it’s a signal to the Soviets and the Soviets who were about to intervene on Egypt’s side back off. And he then sees the opportunity, Kissinger sees the opportunity, he courts Sadat, and he brings the Egyptians into the American orbit where they still are today.

So you just can’t imagine an American Secretary of State operating in any way like that today. So looking at the time, I’m going to just talk a little bit about the Kissinger worldview. This is a means of explaining him just by way of finishing off. People say that he’s the ultimate practitioner of realpolitik. It’s just from his point of view, he always resisted this and he recoiled at the idea and he said, it’s just not true. And I think the thing up to understand about Kissinger, whether you like him or not, is that Henry Kissinger, Heinz Kissinger was a child of Weimar. He spent his youth watching Jews become pariahs. He was regularly beaten up for the accident of his birth. His family was subject to repression, restriction. And remember what he says about arriving in America, America for him is freedom.

He has this special feeling for what America means, and he says that native born citizens always take it for granted. It’s freedom. He’s living in a free society. For him, freedom is not just a theory, freedom is real and it’s personal. And extraordinary interview with Mike Wallace in 58, and I was going to show, we haven’t got time for it, but he talks about the pursuit of a free society as being a spiritual offensive that the country should go. I mean, this is not a man who’s cynical, this is someone who believes in freedom. But as I’ve always said about Kissinger in this lecture, he’s complicated because he believes in freedom, but he’s very suspicious. He’d seen what democracy can do in Germany, he’s seen democracy as an enabler of tyranny and ultimately an enabler of genocide.

So yes, he’s for freedom. He’s very ambivalent when it comes to democracy, and when Chile was deposed, when Allende was deposed, he said to one of his aims, “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” Now that’s quite a shocking statement, but you can see absolutely where it comes from. He doesn’t trust the will of the people and the will of the people goes against his fundamental views. He sees the world as a dark place. He sees the world as a place where potential catastrophe is always around the corner. And he once wrote that Americans who’ve never suffered disaster, find it difficult to comprehend a policy that’s conducted with a premonition of catastrophe. So he’s driven, ultimately he’s driven by a commitment to avoid the nightmare that he sees as World War III. And he’s desperate to ensure the Cold War never becomes a whole war.

As a student of Europe after Napoleonic Wars, he believes in the great powers. And so he cultivates the great powers, sunset of great powers, China, Russia, the United States, and they’re the ones who are going to keep order and stability in peace. Unfortunately, if you’re a smaller country, you may get in the way and your rights and your freedoms will be subordinated to what he sees as the greater good. I’m going to end on one final story because I think more than any other story I’ve heard about Kissinger, I think it really tells you something about who he is. It’s the late 1970s and he’s attending a gathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners. And one of the previous winners who’s from Argentina, stands up and accuses Kissinger of collective massacre and genocide. And he reads the whole litany, bombing of Cambodia, the bombing of Hanoi, the deposing of Allende, the support for the hunter in Argentina.

He just goes on. And Kissinger gets up and he says, “You know, I know something of genocide and massacre and 13 of my relatives were killed in the Holocaust.” The room becomes very quiet and Kissinger continues. He says, “I’m not one who’s insensitive to the idea of genocide because of my experience. And my aim was not for perfection, but for the best accommodation we can make in order to get a stable world order. Getting a stable world order, even if it may seem you cold and calculating, is form of morality. It may not be as pure as a human rights morality, people on the sidelines talk about, but it is a type of morality.” And that I think agree or disagree is the authentic voice of Henry Kissinger. Thank you. And I’m dreadfully sorry going over. But let’s have a look at the comments and questions.

Q&A and Comments

Well, oops, there we go. Right. Let’s have a look and see.

Q: Marilyn asks, is there a benchmark one can use to determine the severity of a number of civilians killed in a war incident? A: I mean, that’s such a difficult question and it’s terrible to say there have been benchmarks because governments and militaries do have their own benchmarks. But you know, it’s a terrible thing to have to do and it’s a matter of pragmatics, but certainly not one of morality.

And Lois and Stan say, we always enjoy the story. Henry bought fabric in Hong Kong to make a suit, but didn’t have time to have it made. Tailors in Paris, London and New York told him there was insufficient fabric. However, the tailor in Tel Aviv made the suit. When he commented on this situation, tailor told him that in Israel, he’s not such a big man. I’d never heard that story. Okay, that’s very funny.

Q: How did Paula arrange to get her family out of Germany via England, asks Molly. A: It was still relatively possible and you could still do it. I wouldn’t say easily with greater ease in 1938, before Kristallnacht. So it was not the impossibility that it later became.

And Rose says, you’re correct about Kissinger. Very divisive, self-hating Jew if you ask me. He did help Golda Meir in the Yom Kippur War. I think he despised himself and met him and Rabin at a Simon Wiesenthal event He was old and had little to offer as opposed to Paris who was spry and amazing. Well, listen, this is what I mean. He is divisive and we all have strong opinions. Is he a self hating Jew? I don’t think he was a self hating Jew. I think he was a problematic Jew for sure. I’m not sure if he despised himself. I’m not sure if I’d buy that. And he was a pessimist about the world. You know, he thought the world was a dark place. I have to say I would not want Henry Kissinger in charge of decisions right now. But given the way the world is and given what’s happening in the world, I wouldn’t mind having a Henry Kissinger as a source of advice because I do think he’d acquired a lot of wisdom about the way the world actually works.

Rose says, “He never lost his German accent.” Yes, that’s right. His brother did apparently. His brother had an American accent. And when Kissinger was asked about it, he liked to joke. He said, “Ah, yes. They always say he’s the Kissinger who listens.” So make it that of you will. Monique and Danny, an old joke in Israel from when Rabin was prime Minister. Rabin is visiting the zoo where Henry Kissinger is the zookeeper. Rabin sees that the lamb is lying with the lion, sorry, the lamb is lying down with a lion.

Rabin says, “Henry, how did you do this?” And Kissinger answers, “Every day I bring another lamb.” SO there you go. Another Kissinger story. It’s amazing how many there are. Barry says, I remember when Henry Kissinger came to South Africa in the late 60s and pressured the South African government to stop supporting Ian Smith, the then PM of Rhodesia and for Rhodesia to hand over to Mugabe who ended up becoming a dictator. Yes. I mean, you know, the unforeseen consequences in politics and history of the things that we do and the fact that in politics everything had a long tail. These big decisions have a long tail of 1500 years, and we often never see which way they’re going.

Q: Monique and Danny again, “Is it possible that he suffered from some form of Stockholm syndrome?” A: Interesting, interesting.

Nanette. “Interesting that in those times, very few women were allowed to go to university, especially to Harvard. Only one woman is on the photo.” Yes, I mean, that was a faculty photo. It’s not a student photo. But yes, certainly true.

Q: Was he married and were there any children? A: He was married. He was married more than once. And he had two children, I believe from his first marriage.

Louise, “How do we know that Kissinger read the boss. Nixon had power independent of Kissinger, and doubt was undertook some actions independent of him. I find Kissinger’s intelligence only as to seeing him as a dangerous opportunist chameleon. There were too many policies and outcomes where he might have read the boss too well and colluded.” I mean, that’s so interesting. He did read the boss, Kissinger liked to please the boss as well. And you wonder on how many occasions did he do things because he thought it was the right thing to do, and how many occasions did he do things because he thought it was what the boss wanted. Very difficult, very complex.

AC and Mark. “I understand his death has never been explained entirely. The consensus at the moment is that he really did shoot himself.” Never heard that. Interesting, okay. Thank you very much for that. And let’s just have one more. Serena says, “Political satire is alive and well. Sadly, Iran as a leader for nuclear disarmament, Saudi Arabia as a leader for women’s rights, Palestine as a yellow screamer, genocide, and baby killing.” I think that is a sober moment and a sober comment on which to end.

So I thank you all for joining and look forward to seeing you next time around. Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.