Henry Kissinger: a revisionist biography

KISSINGER
Volume I. 1923-1968: The Idealist
By Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press
986 pages; $39.95

It is very rare for an official biography to be also a revisionist biography, but this one is. Usually it's the official life that the revisionists attempt to dissect and refute, but such is the historical reputation of Henry Kissinger, and the avalanche of books and treatises already written about him, that Niall Ferguson's official biography is in part an effort to revise the revisionists. "Kissinger. Volume I. 1923-1968: The Idealist" - which takes its subject up to the age of 45, about to begin his first stint of full-time government service - constitutes the most comprehensive defence of Mr Kissinger's outlooks and actions since his own three-volume, 3,900-page autobiography, published between 1979 and 1999.

Unlike the revisionists, Professor Ferguson has had access to every part of Mr Kissinger's vast archive at the Library of Congress, which weighs several tonnes and comprises 8,380 documents covering 37,645 pages on the digitised database alone. Professor Ferguson gives the full story of the Kissinger family's experience under the Third Reich before they emigrated in 1938, and Professor Ferguson has identified at least 23 close family members who perished in the Holocaust. The first chapters covering the Kissingers' life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York recapture the Jewish immigrant experience superbly and put into perspective the fact that Henry (born Heinz) became the first foreign-born US citizen to serve as secretary of state.

What brought Mr Kissinger to huge public prominence while still only an assistant professor was his radical prescription for how to deal with the perceived (though in fact chimerical) relative weakness of the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union at the time of the successful launch of the Sputnik space satellite in October 1957. As Mr Kissinger wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, "The best opportunity to compensate for our inferiority in manpower" is "to use our superiority in technology to best advantage". For Professor Ferguson, Mr Kissinger's argument "fails to convince," but it won Kissinger interviews on "Face the Nation" and with The New York Herald Tribune that - once his accent and acerbic wit came to be appreciated by the American public - put him on the trajectory to intellectual rock star status that he never lost.

Professor Ferguson's access to the diaries Mr Kissinger kept before, during and after his visits to Vietnam in 1965 and 1966 allows him to argue, totally convincingly, that on his missions for the Johnson administration, Mr Kissinger realised very early on that the US had little or no hope of winning the war and therefore needed to enter into direct negotiations with Hanoi sooner rather than later, albeit from a position of strength. This book contains the first full account of the abortive initiative to start talks with Hanoi in 1967; as Ferguson puts it, "to an extent never previously recognized by scholars," Mr Kissinger attempted "to broker some kind of peace agreement with the North Vietnamese, using a variety of indirect channels of communication to Hanoi that passed through not only Paris but also Moscow."

Yet it is in Professor Ferguson's comprehensive demolition of the revisionist accounts of the 1968 election by Seymour Hersh, Christopher Hitchens and others that this book will be seen as controversial. For he totally rejects the conspiracy theory that blames Mr Kissinger for leaking details of the Paris peace negotiations to the Nixon camp, details that enabled Mr Nixon, it was said, to persuade the South Vietnamese that they would get better treatment if he and not Hubert Humphrey were in the White House. Professor Ferguson goes into this theory in great detail, disproving it on several grounds, but especially for its lack of even the most basic actual or circumstantial evidence.

This is an admiring portrait rather than a particularly affectionate one. Professor Ferguson acknowledges in his preface all of the "conversing with him, supping with him, even traveling with him" that he did over the many years he spent researching and writing this book. But if Mr Kissinger's official biographer cannot be accused of falling for his subject's justifiably famed charm, he certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the Republic, someone who has been repulsively traduced over several decades and who deserved to have a defence of this comprehensiveness published years ago.

©2015 The New York Times News Service

Editors' Note: October 2, 2015
After this review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson's authorised biography of Henry Kissinger was published, editors learnt that the reviewer, Andrew Roberts, had initially been approached by a publisher to write the biography himself; he says he turned the offer down for personal reasons, and Professor Ferguson was eventually enlisted to undertake the task. In addition, Mr Roberts and Professor Ferguson were credited as co-authors of a chapter contributed to a book edited by Professor Ferguson and first published in 1997 (Mr Roberts describes their relationship as professional and friendly, but not close). Had editors been aware of these connections, they would have been disclosed in the review.