Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The ruinous effect of the American tariff on cigars plus the persuasions of a brother in America decided Lazarus Morgenthau to emigrate at the age of fifty. In New York he failed to flourish a second time. While his wife had to take in boarders, and the sons had to go out to work, he devoted what remained of his remarkable energy and inventiveness to raising funds for Jewish charities, in the course of which he invented the theater benefit. Persuading producers and theater-owners to donate a performance, he personally went the rounds of prominent Jewish homes to sell tickets at high prices. He had, however, an erratic temperament which, in the family’s reduced circumstances, caused a separation from his high-minded and hardworking wife.

  From these genes and environment Henry emerged—Horatio Alger with a Jewish conscience. Speedily learning English, he graduated from public high school at fourteen, entered City College for a career in law but was forced to leave before the end of his first year to help support the family by working as an errand boy at $4 a week. After clerking in a law office for four years while teaching in an adult night school at $15 a week, he put himself through Columbia Law School and was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one. With two friends he formed a law firm in 1879 when the average age of the partners was twenty-three.

  Strongly affected by the fall in family circumstances, and intensely ambitious, he was determined to make a fortune solid enough to withstand economic caprice, to provide for his mother and assure his children the advantages he had missed. He accomplished his goal in the practice of realty law, by conceiving the corporate form of doing business in real estate and by shrewd and venturesome buying of lots at the future crosstown stops of the advancing subway system.

  While he was making money, he was constantly troubled and made restless, as shown by his notebook of moral maxims, by the demands of a political idealism and a strong social conscience, which led him to active involvement in municipal reform movements to combat the tenement system, to improve working conditions after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, to association with Lillian Wald in social work, and most particularly to close association and friendship with a man of advanced ideas, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. It is characteristic of Morgenthau that he was drawn to a radical figure twenty years his junior, and that when Wise refused the conditions proposed by the trustees for the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El, Morgenthau financed him in the founding of the libertarian Free Synagogue and served as its first president. The fact that Wise was already the active and outspoken secretary of the American Federation of Zionists obviously presented no dilemma.

  In this respect I am struck by the fact that the two men whom I remember from my childhood as representing Jewish affairs to my assimilationist family were, paradoxically, two ardent Zionists, Stephen Wise and Judah Magnes. No doubt this was because they were both men of outstanding mind and character; but I wonder if it was not also because their primary subject—the return to Palestine—exercised a powerful appeal. Magnes’ concept of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state made, I know, a strong impression on my father. I personally do not remember anything very significant about Wise, except that he was rather frightening. He wore an enormous black hat and, I think, a black cloak, and when we met him on the way to school on Central Park West near his synagogue, he used to sweep off the hat with a bow to a child of about eight and say in his booming voice, “Good morning, Miss Wertheem,” a way in which no one else pronounced the name.

  Magnes was different; there was a quality about him I cannot describe without sounding sentimental: something beautiful in his face, something that inspired a desire to follow, even to love. Although I had no individual contact with him beyond being allowed to sit at the dinner table and listen to him talk, I remember no one who made a greater impression. He talked about travels through wild areas of Palestine and a dangerous adventure in the desert—could it have been Sinai?—where he was stranded and came close to death. Beatrice Magnes, his wife, seemed to me equally admirable.

  In an opposite sense from my grandfather, there was no dilemma for Magnes either, although he and Mrs. Magnes belonged to the “establishment.” It is interesting that of the American Zionist leaders, both Magnes and Brandeis were second-generation Americans and Wise close to it, having come to this country from Budapest at the age of seventeen months.

  To return to Morgenthau: At the age of fifty-six, moved by Woodrow Wilson’s appearance on the political scene in 1912, and by a doctor’s warning that a loud heart murmur left him not long to live (a prognosis happily wrong by thirty-five years), he reached the rare decision that he had made enough money and could terminate his business career to enter public service. Wilson’s fight against social exclusiveness in the Princeton eating clubs made a special appeal to a Jew, who saw in him the image of a true democrat dedicated to equal opportunity for all Americans. Morgenthau pledged $5,000 a month for four months to launch Wilson’s presidential campaign, undertook the chairmanship of the Democratic Finance Committee, and, with an additional personal donation of $10,000, became one of the largest individual contributors.

  The reward was not, as he had hoped, a Cabinet post as Secretary of the Treasury, but a minor ambassadorship—as it then was—to Turkey, the more disappointing because it was a post set aside for Jews. Given Morgenthau’s passionate desire to prove that a Jew could and would be accepted in America on equal grounds with anyone else, the offer was peculiarly painful. It was, of course, this intense faith in equal opportunity for the Jew in America, and the fear of being thought to have another loyalty, that made him and others like him resist so strongly the movement for a separate Jewish state. Again, one has to think in terms of the time. The struggle for equal position was then less advanced than it is now and anti-Semitism more emphatically operative. Jews like my grandfather, who had set their lives to overcoming it, felt that political Zionism would supply an added cause for discrimination.

  Morgenthau initially rejected Wilson’s offer. He changed his mind under the influence of Stephen Wise, who persuaded him of the importance of having a Jew officially in contact with Palestine. He took up his post in Constantinople less than a year before history broke over the Turkish capital, transforming it into one of the key diplomatic posts of the world. Morgenthau found himself in the role of the leading neutral ambassador, caretaker for the Allied embassies, protector and mediator for Christians, Jews, Armenians, and every person and institution caught in the chaos of the Ottoman empire. The task used all his talents—nerve, tact, imagination, humor, and, above all, a capacity for direct action in ways no trained diplomat would ever contemplate. Henry was electric, my grandmother believed; she said she felt weak when he entered the room. The spectacular activity of his tenure at Constantinople does not belong in this essay, except insofar, I think, as the praise and renown he won obscured for him the disappointment of Wilson’s original offer, reinforced his optimism, ambition, and belief in American opportunity, and thus his anti-Zionism.

  No dilemma entered into his aid for the Jews of Palestine. The impulse was humanitarian, redoubled by group attachment. He was to do as much, if not more, for the Armenians and later, as League of Nations Commissioner, for resettlement of the Greeks. His sense of what it means to be an oppressed people, particularly in the case of the Armenians, in whom he saw a parallel with the Jews, certainly underlay both those efforts. He remains today a national hero to the Armenians and has a street named for him in Athens, although none in Jerusalem, which is fair enough.*1

  Zionism did not become an acute dilemma for its opponents until about 1917, when, in anticipation of the end of the Turkish empire, Zionist agitation for a recognized homeland grew intense. In some members of the Jewish establishment the Balfour Declaration touched off almost a sense of panic. At that time Zionists were bringing pressure on President Wilson for a public commitment, and when, in March 1918, Rabbi Wise led a delegation to the White House for this purpose without informing Morgenthau, who was still president of his pulpit, the sad break came. Morgenthau resi
gned as president of the Free Synagogue.

  In 1921 he proclaimed his opposition to Zionism in an exceedingly combative article, which he republished in full in his autobiography two years later. Zionism, he wrote, is “an Eastern European proposal … which if it were to succeed would cost the Jews of America most of what they have gained in liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Because of his opposition he saw hazards which the proponents preferred not to look at: that the Balfour Declaration was ambiguous, that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine resented the Zionist program and “intend to use every means at their command to frustrate it.” Through a massive polemic of political, economic, and religious arguments, he harshly concluded that the Zionist goal “never can be attained and that it ought not to be attained.”

  In his eighties, in the shadow of the Holocaust, he privately acknowledged that he had read history wrong. He died at ninety-one, a year before the re-creation of the state of Israel.

  The dilemma for Henry Morgenthau was really more American than Jewish. Prior to Hitler and the ultimate disillusion, he saw no need for nationhood because he believed the future of the Jew as a free person was here, and that it was threatened by the demand for separate nationhood. In his fierce desire for proof of assimilation, he established his summer home, when he was in his seventies, in the Wasp stronghold of Bar Harbor, Maine, consorting with the snobs, to my acute embarrassment on my visits. Possibly they liked or admired him—he was a man of great charm, known as Uncle Henry to all acquaintances from FDR to the policeman on the beat—but what slights he may have endured I cannot tell. Yet he never for an instant attempted to play down his Jewish identity or remain passive in regard to his people. On the contrary, he emphasized his ties to them throughout his life, serving as founder, trustee, and officer of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and every kind of Jewish organization.

  Assimilation, for him, did not mean to cross over to Christianity; it meant to be accepted in Bar Harbor as a Jew: that was the whole point. He wanted to be a Jew and an American on the same level as the best. He wanted America to work in terms of his youthful ideals—and of course it did not. Perhaps the dilemma was America’s, not his.

  * * *

  Address, American Historical Association, December 1976. Commentary, May 1977.

  *1 Since the appearance of this article, Mayor Teddy Kollek, the alert presiding genius of Jerusalem, has invalidated my statement.

  Kissinger: Self-Portrait

  IN THE LAST CENTURY the historian Leopold von Ranke laid down the dictum that foreign relations were supreme among the influences that shape the history of nations. This may be arguable, but for the immediate past it is certainly maintainable. No one has been more deeply engaged at so influential a level in the conduct of foreign relations than former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, or gained so much public recognition of his role. He became a cult figure, a popular celebrity, the subject of countless full-length books, studies, and analyses. Publication of his own version is thus something of a historical event.

  With some relief I can report that it contains no more Metternich. Because Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation and first published book, A World Restored, dealt with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and the resettlement of Europe after the windstorm of Napoleon, everyone writing about Kissinger since then has made a comparison between them. Kissinger, writing about himself, does not mention Metternich—rightly, for the world he has had to deal with is so different in such absolute ways that a comparison is inapplicable. The differences are important: Whatever their rivalries, the nations at the Congress of Vienna had a common outlook and a common goal—restoration of the status quo ante. Today nations are split between two opposing ideologies, and the globe is dominated by two antagonistic superpowers locked in quarrel. Balance of power is inoperable; the third world has emerged to upset any balance; a new risk center exists in the Middle East; the industrial nations are in thrall to the oil of the undeveloped; nuclear weaponry overshadows all.

  In such a world Kissinger’s task as he saw it on taking office in the administration of Richard M. Nixon in January 1969 was to end the Vietnam war, manage a “global rivalry” and nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union, reinvigorate alliance with the European democracies, and integrate the new nations into a “new world equilibrium.”

  How well did he succeed in his mission? He himself offers no over-all assessment—perhaps because he has allowed himself no time for reflection. To make ready for publication a text of 1,476 pages in two and a half years since leaving office is an Olympic feat leaving little room for philosophy. Kissinger has been in such a hurry to vindicate his management of complex and turbulent events that he seems not to have let a day elapse between doing and writing or removed himself in any way to gain perspective. The book is all record, no assessment. He has written too much too soon.

  The plunge into writing seems to carry on a habit and a condition of his office. Its pressures did not allow time to think, to examine a problem on all sides and a course of action in all its consequences. This is undoubtedly a fault of the system rather than of character; public life, as Kissinger acknowledges, “is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” Surely that is all the more reason, once released from the pressure, to have taken time for thought.

  What we have is an immensely long and superfluously detailed account of virtually every message, meeting, journey, negotiation, and conversation in the fifty months from Kissinger’s appointment in November 1968 to the signing of peace with North Vietnam at the end of President Nixon’s first term in January 1973. We do not need all the aide-mémoires and the daily comings and goings of Egon Bahr, Vladimir Semenov, and dozens of other secondary intermediaries to understand what was going on; indeed, the picture would be clearer if Kissinger had taken the trouble to strain out the insignificant and condense his tale as a whole. Since by training he knows better than to confuse setting down the total record with writing history, one must assume that the record—in his version—was what he wanted, and I have no doubt that specialists in strategic arms, the U.S.S.R., NATO, China, Chile, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and Vietnam will be mining it for years.

  It is enlivened (in spots) by small revelations, vivid scenes and portraits, and glimpses of the often astonishing mechanics of official life. For example, out of the blue in August 1969 a Soviet Embassy official asked a State Department official at lunch what would be the United States’ reaction to a Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities. Mr. Nixon’s speechwriting staff had a specialist for every tone the President wished to adopt. In 1969 China had only one ambassador serving abroad—in Cairo. Through names presented privately by Kissinger to Ambassador Anatoly I. Dobrynin, the release of 550 out of 800 hardship cases of Soviet Jews was obtained over a period of time. On a presidential journey every member of the official party is given a little book listing every event and movement timed to the minute, together with charts showing where everyone is to stand. All these are surprises, at least to this reviewer.

  There are sparkles amid the long stretches: the “thrill” of the first summit visit when, as the plane door opened on arrival in Brussels, “we were bathed in the arc lights of television,” a red carpet and honor guard were on hand, and the King of the Belgians waited at the foot of the ramp; the papal audience, during which smoke suddenly poured from the garments of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (in response to Kissinger’s suggestion that he dispose of his cigar, he had concealed it alive in his suit pocket). There are incisive small history lessons introducing, among others, the problems of Pakistan and of Poland. There are gems of quotation, as when Dean Acheson, asked why a meeting of senior advisers lasted so long, replied, “We are all old and we are all eloquent.”

  The author is less good at profundities. When he attempts them, for example in reflections on the space age, his langu
age invariably swells into the sententious, not to say banal, and he sounds less like himself than Gerald R. Ford. On the “agony of Vietnam” he sees his role as “helping my adopted country heal its wounds, preserve its faith and … rededicate itself to the great tasks of construction awaiting it.” Or, on the end of the war, he hopes Americans will “close ranks” and the peoples of Indochina “perhaps attain at long last the future of tranquility, security and progress … worthy of their sacrifices.” Coming from the sardonic gentleman who once, on being thanked by an effusive well-wisher for “saving the world,” is reputed to have replied, “You’re welcome,” this is pure hype on a level with campaign rhetoric, as if he were running for office. Perhaps he is.

  Perhaps that explains his hurry to bring out the book, in good time to make its impression before November 1980. Could it be that this tremendous tome is a campaign document designed to exhibit the author as the most knowledgeable, experienced and expert, the ineluctable, the only possible Secretary of State under the next Republican President? I cannot believe that his eye is on Capitol Hill. The Senate has no scope for the summiteer, for shuttle diplomacy, for the commuter from Tel Aviv to Peking to Moscow to Bonn, the guest at Chequers and the Elysée. I imagine it is to this life of the Air Force One jet set that he wants to return.

  That would explain why—for the sake of dignity—Kissinger as a personality, the phenomenon of Super-K, the swinger, the media’s delight, is missing from this book. Beyond some rather stilted references to “my warped sense of humor,” no hint comes through, yet the attention showered upon him must be a factor in the record. “Power is an aphrodisiac,” Kissinger himself has said (though not in this book), and although popularity is a different thing, it reinforces power. Kissinger’s explanation of his popularity with the press is that because its members disliked President Nixon they tended to give credit for favorable developments to “more admired associates … and I became the beneficiary of this state of affairs.” Clearly more than that was at work; a distinct personality made itself felt. Kissinger was refreshing and the press succumbed to the wit and charm he knew how to exercise, although they find virtually no expression here.