by David Milne
Observing each other in action throughout 1968, Nixon and Kissinger must have struggled to discern when one was lying or being sincere. Indeed, during the 1972 election campaign, Nixon worried (in needlessly paranoid—or “Nixonian”—fashion) that Kissinger might jump ship and offer sensitive information to whoever was likeliest to promote his career prospects. “Remember,” Nixon said to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, “he came to us in ’68 with tales.”13 These first actions evidently left a lasting impression. Nixon and Kissinger paired up after some scandalous infidelities—Kissinger betrayed Harriman; Nixon, his country. This was clearly not a solid foundation on which to base a long-term relationship. In combination the two men scored some remarkable achievements. But it was little wonder that each would habitually suspect the other of cheating on them.
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Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, where his father, Louis, was a teacher at the local school. A refined and articulate—though reticent—man, Louis Kissinger read and collected great books, revered classical music, played the piano, and proselytized on the pleasures of intellectual endeavor—reminding his children that they were engaged in a perpetual exercise in self-improvement, or Bildung.14 Bavaria, however, was a hostile environment for Jews. Louis’s Judaism barred him from serving his country during the First World War. Young Heinz himself was prevented from attending the gymnasium, or state-run high school, because of his religion. Instead he was enrolled at the Israelitische Realschule, a fine Jewish school where history, philosophy, and religion were taken very seriously; each student studied the Bible and Talmud for two hours every day.15
As Hitler consolidated power after 1933, it became increasingly clear that the Nazis viewed segregation as insufficient in itself. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 dissolved Jews’ German citizenship, forbade intermarriage, and barred Jews from numerous professions, including teaching. Heinz’s childhood friend Werner Gundelfinger described the suffocating nature of Nazi repression: “We couldn’t go to the swimming pool, the dances, or the tea room. We couldn’t go anywhere without seeing the sign: Juden Verboten. These are things that remain in your subconscious.”16
When Walter Lippmann observed in 1933 that Germany’s Jews might serve as a conveniently placed lightning rod, deflecting Hitler’s attention from the rest of Europe, he was thinking of families like the Kissingers and the Gundelfingers.
State-sanctioned persecution and the volatile passions of the masses were the dark mainstays of Heinz’s formative years. The rise and fall of Weimar Germany had exposed democracy’s deficiencies when confronted by a ruthless and opportunistic adversary; Hitler’s Germany illustrated the brute force of totalitarianism and the effectiveness of propagating simple and poisonous lies. Kissinger drew the attendant conclusions. Paraphrasing Goethe, Kissinger later observed that “if I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”17 Though their points of departure were different, Kissinger, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan all shared grave concerns about the naïveté of the masses. All were troubled by democracy’s gaping blind side.
After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Heinz’s tenacious and farsighted mother, Paula, wrote to her first cousin, who lived in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, asking if her sons, Heinz and Walter, could come and live with her. Fearing for Paula and Louis’s safety, the cousin suggested that the whole family emigrate, not just the children. It proved to be lifesaving advice for Paula and her husband. On August 30, 1938, the Kissingers departed Bavaria for New York via London. A brave and defiant Heinz, who Anglicized his name to Henry upon arrival in the United States, told a German customs inspector at the border: “I’ll be back someday.”18
Heinz was prophetic, though his pluck could not mask a wrenching experience for a family that had venerated German culture only to have the nation turn on them. Louis was forced to leave behind his beloved library, the focal point of the family’s erudition and ambition. Henry later responded stoically to questions that addressed the traumas of his childhood. In 1971, for example, he said, “That part of my childhood is not the key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy. I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious.”19 Whether Kissinger’s response was brave or genuine, Hitler’s Germany took a terrible toll on the extended family members who chose to remain or were too old or infirm to leave. Thirteen perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Fürth and New York City were different worlds. America’s largest city was ethnically heterogeneous, entrepreneurial rather than hierarchical, and expanded at breakneck speed throughout the 1930s, serving as a haven for European Jews and as a magnet for the world’s brightest minds. After passing through Ellis Island, the Kissingers effectively started again with a blank slate. Paula Kissinger worked long hours as a housekeeper and a caterer to support her family. But her husband struggled to adjust to losing the status accrued through his refined tastes and teaching accomplishments in Bavaria. Louis Kissinger could not find the right map to navigate the New World.
Henry had no such status to lose and so managed the transition to living in New York City more comfortably. He attended George Washington High School—an excellent public school—and established himself as an outstanding student. He mastered English swiftly, though never losing his strong Bavarian accent; this part of his identity—conveying a seriousness of thought and purpose—was inviolable. Henry took a part-time job in a brush-making factory, providing additional resources for a family living in straitened circumstances. The comparison in life experience with Paul Nitze, who by that time had made all the money he could ever need, is stark. After graduating from high school, Henry embarked on an accountancy degree at City College, attended by many émigré Jews in New York. It did not charge tuition and the students could continue to live at home, the professors were excellent, and the students at this time—Jews in particular—became highly respected and well known in all fields of endeavor. Henry recalled, “My horizons were not that great when I was in City College. I never really thought of accounting as a calling, but I thought it might be a nice job.”20
After he had completed just a year at City College, the U.S. Army drafted Kissinger in February 1943. He was a serious and hardworking youth of just nineteen years when he left Manhattan for basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina—another jolting change in environment. In Fürth and Washington Heights, Henry had been immersed in an orthodox German Jewish milieu. The Army’s all-consuming demands of training—the drills, early starts, communal eating, cajoling, and bullying—ironed out the religious diversity of the draftees and ripped up the comforting routines of many recent immigrants. This had a positive dimension as well as a disorienting one, and Kissinger found that “the significant thing about the army was that it made me feel like an American … It was the first time I was not with German Jewish people. I gained confidence in the army.” Yet life in Spartanburg was not without difficulty, and he endured prejudice. After he scored exceptionally well on aptitude tests, the Army denied Kissinger the opportunity to become a doctor because of its quota on the number of Jews permitted to train as physicians. Impermanence, insecurity, and anti-Semitism—of different orders of magnitude—had been constants throughout his life: “Living as a Jew under the Nazis, then as a refugee in America, and then as a private in the Army isn’t exactly an experience that builds confidence.”21 But Kissinger secured one prize through his Army service that bolstered his sense of permanence and place: at Camp Croft he became a naturalized American citizen.
While Kissinger’s Judaism prevented him from becoming an Army doctor, his fluency in German and experience of life under Hitler made him a valuable commodity to the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program and given the brief of educating his fellow soldiers on the reasons why America was at war with Nazi Germany. Kissinger moved to Camp
Claiborne in Louisiana, where he met Fritz Kraemer, another German émigré—though of aristocratic Prussian origin—whose job was to explain the peculiar evils of Nazism to American soldiers. Kissinger observed Kraemer in action and was impressed by the forcefulness of his speech and the quality of his insights. He wrote him a fan note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you somehow?” Kraemer met with Kissinger and was deeply impressed by his intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose, noting that Henry had “a sixth sense of musicality—historical musicality.” The two men became close; Kissinger had discovered his first mentor and won his patronage, marking an important stage in his career and intellectual development. Kraemer was deeply versed in philosophy and history—he had a bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics and doctorates from the universities of Frankfurt and Rome—and Kissinger drew all the insight he could. “He would squeeze me for my ideas the way one would squeeze a sponge,” Kraemer recalled. “He hankered for knowledge, for truth. He wanted to know everything.”22
Kraemer recommended Kissinger for assignment to Germany as a translator for the division’s general. He informed his superiors that he had been thoroughly impressed by “this little Jewish refugee [who] as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything.”23 And so, making good on his promise to the Nazi customs official in 1938, Kissinger returned to Germany in November 1944 as a translator for General Alexander Bolling. He was soon after promoted to a much larger role as the administrator of Krefeld, a small city in Westphalia, where he was instrumental in restoring order. Henry was promoted again to serve as a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps, assuming control of a large district in the state of Hesse. What an empowering experience this must have been: returning to the scene of an awful crime visited upon him, his family, and millions of fellow Jews, and bringing some of its perpetrators to justice. With his keen insight into the German psyche, Kissinger was particularly effective at smoking out former Gestapo. As Jeremi Suri observes in Henry Kissinger and the American Century:
Decades later, Kissinger enjoyed recounting how he manipulated German habits for American purposes. In 1945 he posted signs in occupied areas requesting job applications from men with “police experience.” When an applicant arrived at Kissinger’s office, “I asked him what he had been doing, and he said Staats polizei [state police]. I then asked him in a joking manner, Geheim Staats Polizei [Gestapo]? And he said yes. So I locked him up … I locked up more Gestapo than the entire rest of the U.S. Army.”24
Though highly effective at his job, Kissinger had no appetite for the coarser aspects of revenge and scolded those who crossed the line in the interview room. He was awarded the Bronze Star for distinguished service.
Kissinger abandoned his religion during this time. He met many Jews who had survived Nazi concentration camps and was at a loss to find solace in the faith in which he had been immersed. “How could a benevolent God have allowed such horrors against his worshippers?” was Kissinger’s unanswered question, and that of many others beside.25 His vast energy and the self-reliance of the talented immigrant propelled his career forward while a deep pessimism about human nature cautioned him against trusting people too easily, or hewing too closely to the Wilsonian strain of thought regarding the world’s perfectibility. God was dead to Kissinger, and his worldview became accordingly fatalistic, anticipating worst-case scenarios. In this regard Fritz Kraemer is insightful on Kissinger’s experiences of Germany: “Kissinger is a strong man, but the Nazis were able to damage his soul … For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horrors of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse … It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”26
As his Army service in Germany approached its end, Kissinger pondered what he would do in the United States upon his return—the study of accountancy had lost all its limited appeal. Kraemer was on hand to dispense typically bracing advice to his protégé in 1947. Responding to Kissinger’s complaints regarding the shallowness of his education—“I know nothing,” Henry despaired—Kraemer said, “Go to a fine college. A gentleman does not go to the College of the City of New York.”27 Kissinger followed this advice and applied to Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. His application letter read: “In order to adequately prepare myself for a literary carreer [sic] with political history as the main field of interest, I consider it essential to acquire a Liberal Arts education.”28 Columbia and Princeton rejected him, but Harvard—at that time making a concerted effort to recruit veterans of exceptional promise—accepted him with a scholarship attached. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man who only seven years before had been assembling shaving brushes after school to make ends meet. The Second World War gave a mighty boost to male social mobility; Henry Kissinger benefited from meritocratic principles taking deeper root in U.S. society.
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Kissinger led a monastic life in Cambridge, working sixteen-hour days to make the most of the gilt-edged opportunity that was a Harvard education. The class of 1950 was the largest in Harvard’s history, and some three-quarters of the incoming sophomores were veterans who had benefited from the GI Bill. The class was more socially than racially diverse, however. James Conant’s presidency had made Harvard somewhat more accommodating to Jewish and nonwhite students, but many of the institutional slights present in Lippmann’s day remained. University administrators believed that housing Jewish students separately would better suit both Jews and Gentiles. So Kissinger was housed in Harvard’s oldest dormitory, Claverly Hall, where he shared accommodations with two fellow Jews. Henry kept these men at a distance, shunned extracurricular activities, and immersed himself in his courses, preparing assiduously for class. As his friend and biographer Stephen Graubard writes, “For the first time in his life, Kissinger experienced the exhilaration that came from habitual reading and writing, he became something of a recluse.”29 To relax, Kissinger set aside the assigned books and instead read novels or The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He avoided reading the editorials—“He said he had to form his own opinions,” remembered one of his roommates, “not learn those of the editors.”30
Professor William Y. Elliott performed a similar role at Harvard to Fritz Kraemer in the Army—swiftly identifying Kissinger’s gifts and encouraging his ambition. A magnetic presence, Elliott did not conform to the stereotype of a Harvard professor. A native of Tennessee and all-American football player at Vanderbilt, Elliott staged cockfights in the basement of his Cambridge town house and delighted in his nickname, “Wild Bill.” More conventionally, Elliott had been a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, and from that experience drew great pleasure in teaching students of uncommon ability on an individual basis. To test Henry’s mettle, he sent him off to the library with a reading list of twenty-five books, inviting him to compare Immanuel Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason. When Kissinger returned, three months later, with an outstanding paper, Elliott was bowled over. He began meeting with Kissinger frequently, lavishing attention in the Oxbridge style on his thinking and writing. Elliott later wrote to the Phi Beta Kappa selection committee that “I have not had any students in the past five years, even among the summa cum laude group, who have had the depth and philosophical insight shown by Mr. Kissinger.” Yet there was still work to be done. Elliott noted that Kissinger’s “mind lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”31
Kissinger’s undergraduate dissertation became something of a Harvard legend. Whereas most students narrow their topic to boost the originality of their contribution—and to be able to finish more quickly—Kissinger chose to write on “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant.” At 388 pages, the dissertation was the longest submitted in Harvard’s history and led to the creation of a “Kissinger rule,” which limited subsequent students to one-third of
this length. The dissertation discussed the ways Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Immanuel Kant grappled with the meaning of history, but also contained lengthy digressions on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spinoza, Goethe, Rousseau, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and others, proving to readers the breadth and ambition of Kissinger’s reading.
Given that the dissertation assessed Spengler, and was written by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, it is perhaps unsurprising that a deep vein of pessimism informed the argument: “Life is suffering. Birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence. No civilization has yet been permanent … This is necessity, the fatedness of history, the dilemma of mortality … The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.”32 One of the dissertation’s most important themes, however, pertained to the inadequacies of theory testing when applied to politics and international relations. Or as Kissinger phrased it, “It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality.”33 There were no “merely technical” solutions to “the dilemmas of the soul,” Kissinger cautioned, and “political scientists should cease condemning their profession for not living up to their misnomer.” Kissinger was developing a line of thought that Mahan, Lippmann, and Kennan would have cheered: politics and diplomacy are better understood and practiced as an art—requiring skill, craft, creativity, and intuition—than as a science, requiring prediction, hypothesis testing, and the application of theory. Clues to Kissinger’s later inclinations thus abound. The intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick believes that insufficient respect has been accorded Kissinger’s “The Meaning of History,” judging it “the most intellectually creative and sustained piece of work that he wrote, and a key exposition of his concerns.”34 If this is true, though, Kissinger hit his intellectual peak in his midtwenties.