![]() ![]() ![]() My protracted research into Kissinger the policymaker during the period from 1968 through 1973 would lead me to agree emphatically with one part of Spengler’s observation: Kissinger, most of the time, did not know what he was doing (e.g., the evacuation of Saigon, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and the move to DefCon 3 during the 1973 Yom Kippur War). Spengler asserted that “Often enough a statesman does not ‘know’ what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success” (19). The west requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality” (Grandin, 16). “There are two kinds of realists,” Kissinger wrote in 1963, “those who manipulate facts and those who create them. In his senior thesis, which ultimately evolved into his most recent book, World Order, Kissinger declared his support for what today is referred to as radical relativism, to wit, that there is no such thing as absolute truth truth was what one deduced from his or her own solitary perspective. History and circumstance imposed restraints-“necessity”-but the free individual could act within limits to change destiny. Deeply influenced by Spengler and Immanuel Kant, Kissinger argued that individuals possess instinct, intuition, and, most important, will, all of which can be brought to bear when statesmen make decisions. His education, spearheaded by William Yandell Elliot, had consisted primarily of philosophy, especially the metaphysics of political milieus. Kissinger’s senior thesis at Harvard was written during the immediate post–World War II period when existentialism was entering its heyday. But Kissinger did not embrace Spengler’s historical inevitability, the notion that civilizations rise and fall in a never-ending cycle, but rather the freedom of the individual to act within the constraints of history. The most profound intellectual influence on Kissinger, Grandin asserts, was Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West. No, there are deep metaphysical roots to his wrong-doing. Grandin rejects the notion that Kissinger was a mere political opportunist willing to sell his intellectual independence to the highest bidder. In his introduction, Grandin declares that the focus of his work is not on Kissinger’s “outsized personality” but his effect on the contemporary world that accepts war as a more or less permanent state of affairs. The former is a sweeping, penetrating effort to hold Kissinger accountable for his sins and trace them to their ideological origins the latter, the first of two projected volumes, is a combination of first-rate biography and hagiography. The latest offerings in the struggle over Kissinger’s legacy are Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman and Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist. It included a single sentence of criticism which elicited a nine-page, single-spaced rebuttal. ![]() George Ball told me that he had once written a laudatory review of one of Kissinger’s books. I suspect, given my historiographical acquaintance with him, that nothing pleases him more, although he probably could do without the criticism. No figure in the history of contemporary American foreign policy has gotten more ink than Henry A. ![]()
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