Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Hardcover)

by Jeremi Suri (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
University of Wisconsin historian Suri (Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente) endeavors to explore the philosophical roots of Henry Kissinger's actions as national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, finding those roots in a Jewish boy's experiences of a weak Weimar regime's fall to genocidal Nazism. At the end of the day, in Suri's account, Kissinger's philosophy boiled down to the need to back democracy with muscle. America, alone of the free countries, said Kissinger, was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity. But Kissinger's expressed idealism leads Suri to downplay the consequences of Kissinger's actions, including his role in subverting the democratically elected government of Chile's Salvador Allende. Kissinger did not support the brutality of the regimes he supported in Chile, South Africa, and other parts of the Third World, Suri writes. But, the author acknowledges, he did nurture personal relations with their leaders as strongmen who could mobilize force effectively against threats to themselves and the United States. At the close of that statement, Suri stumbles into the unpleasant truth of Kissinger's realpolitik. Illus. (July)
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by David Greenberg

Perhaps because of the pungently Nixonian odor of the Bush White House -- the patriotism politics, the "l'état, c'est moi" declarations, the war -- this season has delivered a bounty of books about the men of Watergate. The current climate has vitalized anxieties about the imperial presidency, drawing fresh scrutiny to the Nixon years from such eminent writers as Robert Dallek, Elizabeth Drew, Margaret MacMillan, James Reston Jr., and Jules Witcover -- not to mention a Nixon biography from the scandal-plagued tycoon Conrad Black and the Broadway drama "Nixon/Frost."

Joining this lengthening queue is Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, with a useful, idiosyncratic study, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Suri isn't trying to compete -- for audience or authoritativeness -- with Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger or MacMillan's Nixon and Mao, which combine scholarly rigor with popular appeal. Rather, he's gambling that less can be more. Suri's Kissinger is an academic rumination on the cerebral Harvard professor-turned-showboating national security adviser that, while intentionally narrow in scope, is bold in its reach.

With his gravelly Germanic mumble, horn-rimmed glasses, cold-blooded espousal of realpolitik, and a head that Oriana Fallaci likened to that of a sheep, Kissinger has become a most improbable American icon. Like his equally complex and controversial benefactor, Richard Nixon, he has generated reams of chitchat, psychobabble and lore, from his 383-page undergraduate thesis to his rumored liaisons with starlets. (One favorite tale: when thanked by an admirer for "saving the world," Kissinger replied: "You're welcome.") If only for his Strangelovean presence in American culture, he warrants explication.

Suri comes at Kissinger in two ways. In the book's first part, he explores Kissinger's formative experiences in their binational context -- the Bavarian Jew living under the Nazis, the immigrant in New York's Washington Heights, the army administrator returning to postwar Germany. In each trying situation, Kissinger learned to leverage his status as an outsider into influence -- a practice that soon became a Kissingerian trademark. In the book's second part, Suri puts forth a close reading of Kissinger's scholarship, finding in it elaborations of the distrust of popular passions first instilled in interwar Germany. In the two final chapters he highlights these traits within Nixon's international policies.

Some readers, it should be warned, may bristle at the author's undisguised admiration for his subject, particularly the words "brilliant," "genius" and "revolutionary," which pepper the prose. And Suri surprisingly omits discussion of Kissinger's well-known role in the original sin of Watergate -- the illegal wiretapping of journalists and White House aides -- and his alleged perjury in hushing it up.

By and large, however, Suri adopts the stance not of a partisan but of a sedate academic. History, after all, while not eschewing normative judgments altogether, calls for understanding more than moralizing -- not just for adjudicating the debates over Nixon's continuation of the Vietnam War and détente, but also for explaining the meaning of those debates. If the book doesn't damn Kissinger for the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam or the 1973 coup against Chile's Salvador Allende, it does try to show why he favored those actions.

The roots of Kissinger's ideas matter because for all his failures of policy and morality, he still elicits purring admiration from a certain insider set. The insiders love Henry because in foreign affairs, despite the proven importance of personal diplomacy, Americans crave overarching visions and "grand strategies" from which policy decisions are said to flow naturally. Kissinger managed to associate the age-old doctrine of realpolitik with his own person.

Of course, policymakers don't implement pure ideas. Individuals must interpret doctrine in light of new situations and through the filters of their own habits of mind. In Kissinger's case, his realism was animated by a cynicism so virulent that it ultimately devoured itself: Whereas more principled realists such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau opposed the Vietnam War from early on, Kissinger (following Nixon's direction) suppressed hard-headed analyses warning that the conflict was unwinnable, preferring to chase the chimeras of credibility and reputation. More recently, Kissinger's covert advice to Bush to mimic Nixon's Vietnam course by standing fast in Iraq -- in opposition to realist perspectives -- suggests that a hunger for influence may again have trumped the logical conclusions of his own nominal worldview.

The underlying problem is that Kissinger never admitted a fatal contradiction in his peculiar brand of realism. As Suri notes, Kissinger was so disdainful of democratic accountability that he came to think that effective statecraft "depended on an almost mythical grand master" -- a philosopher-king, a professor in a Superman uniform -- whose brilliance and personality could hold it all together. Regarding his own era, Kissinger left no doubt about whom he considered that grand master to be.

In describing the legacy he wished to leave, Kissinger once said that he wanted to erect a lasting international framework that would reflect not his own preferences but the basic interests of the United States. Yet, ironically, his grand scheme required that it all rest on his personal touch.

As the years pass, the case for Kissinger's greatness becomes increasingly hard to sustain. His academic reputation has long since been deflated. Most scholars now agree that Nixon conceived and directed his own policy (except when incapacitated by Watergate), with Kissinger functioning as his agent. Even the perennial accusations of war crimes against Henry sound like overwrought sloganeering -- too lofty a charge to level at a mere deputy.

Kissinger is, in the end, a smart man -- not a genius, not even unusually brilliant -- whose lot it was to serve a president whose mania for acclaim, dreams of grandeur and taste for secrecy and deceit matched his own. In one sense, hitching his star to Nixon's was unfortunate for Kissinger, because the shame of Nixon will always be his shame, too. But in another sense it was lucky, because in the Cold War's last years Nixon unleashed him to pursue their shared ambitions on the world stage, not without some benefit. When Nixon fell, Kissinger remained standing, poised with a sly smile to gather the credit.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674025792
• ISBN-13: 978-0674025790
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #382,160 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable book about a remarkable man, a genuine 20th century iconoclast., July 17, 2007

By	Ryan Fisher (Santa Maria, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In "Henry Kissinger and the American Century," Jeremi Suri has chronicled the political history of arguably one of the world's most brilliant personalities. Suri's book leaves out much of Kissinger's personal history, beyond his childhood in Weimar and Nazi Germany, which is generally vague. "Henry Kissinger and the American Century" does, however, provide readers with the background necessary to begin to understand the man and his policies. Suri pays particular attention to Kissinger's skepticism of democracy, which truly helped shape those policies.
Henry Kissinger is a Cold War oracle, subject to the failings of the human condition as any of us, but arguably far more attuned to the strategic and political situation than anyone ever was.
Suri does not dodge logical criticisms and critics and provides a groundwork for understanding of Kissinger's philosophies. Reading the book, you might notice how just when you begin to forget Kissinger's German-Jewish childhood, Suri extols this fact in context throughout.
The book reveals Kissinger's innate ability to address both his genteel and gentile contemporaries. If any American in history ever leveraged their "outsider" status to the maximum and re-define the idea of an "insider", it was Kissinger.
The book is full of exceptional quotes from Kissinger, his influences and his contemporaries that are no less relevant in the War on Terror than they were in the Cold War.
REVIEW EVERY BOOK YOU READ!

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Spin on Traditional Biographies - looks at kissinger the man, not his actions, November 26, 2007

By	James Nabholz (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

Jeremi Suri presents Henry Kissinger in a very unique way, unfamiliar to traditional biographies. His writing and analytic abilities set this book far ahead of any others. Sure, you may read an eight hundred epic on every little think Kissinger did. In "Henry Kissinger and the American Century" the author provides a concise analysis of Kissinger's life and its implications on his later decisions which have gathered such controversy and his impact upon history as a whole.
A fantastic, well written, unique take on Henry Kissinger - a man who is, without a doubt, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.
Five Stars - I can't think of a bad thing about it.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What makes Dr K tick, September 7, 2007

By	Old Fogey (San Francisco, Calif.) - See all my reviews

Henry A. Kissinger, one of a handful of memorable secretaries of state, is a German-born Jew haunted by the failure of democracy in his birthplace and the subsequent failure of the world's democracies to stop the Nazi drive for mastery of Europe in the 1930s. Those failures made possible the massive slaughter of World War II, the nearly total destruction of Jewish life in Europe (which marked Kissinger personally)and in its aftermath left the United States and the exercise of its power the main arbiter of the world's fate. Stalin's Soviet Union, however, had other plans.
Kissinger did not view war with Soviet Russia as inevitable, nor did he regard Russian ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe as altogether unreasonable. But he did think that unless America was willing to project its power in strategic areas of the world, such as Europe and the Middle East, and confront Soviet ambitions in those areas, the Cold War would be lost with dire consequences for Americans.
Kissinger thought the Cold War would make strange bedfellows--reactionary kings, military dictators and strongman-types whose personal vanity outweighed any concern for the future of their people.
Kissinger was a supreme realist. He did not seek the make the world a better place, only a safer one for his adopted country and its friends.
His hero was Metternich, of Congress of Vienna and Balance of Power fame. There was no room for sentimentality, and not much room for public opinion, in his world view. Wars and rumors of wars were not only expected, but exploited by Kissinger, which his critics viewed as coldly cynical, immoral and in some cases (Vietnam, Chile) indifferent to human lives.
Kissinger owed his power, at the height of his career, to Richard M. Nixon, whose feelings toward Jews were mixed at best, bigoted at worst.
Oddly, his Jewish background was an asset in dealing with Arab rulers. They figured that American Jews dictated U.S. policy in the Mideast anyhow, so Kissinger essentially cut out the middle man.
The only weakness of the book is its brevity (less than 300 pages) which doesn't leave much room for analysis of complicated issues. Nuclear weapons negotiations are barely mentioned. None the less, an excellent introduction to a complex man who left a large imprint on America's place in the world.