Kissinger (Walter Isaacson)

...For The Wise Men, though entertaining, was strikingly ambivalent on the most salient issues of the Cold War...

...The roots of Kissinger's conduct, Isaacson suggests, lie in the misguided attitudes he acquired arriving in the United States at the age of 15 as a German-Jewish refugee: A desire to be accepted, a tendency to be distrustful and insecure: these were understandable reactions to a childhood upended by one of the most gruesome chapters in human history...

...But how can a man with his thick Central European accent or his intellectual interest in Metternich and Spengler or his heavy Germanic prose be described as "ardent in the pursuit of acceptance...

...He writes of Kissinger's bestselling Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy without ever troubling himself to discuss Kissinger's arguments...

...Cold War effort may have been justifiable while Stalin sat in the Kremlin, but they ceased to be so the moment he disappeared from the scene...

...The bombing of the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1969, the dispatch of ground forces there in 1970, and the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong (resulting in the destruction of Soviet ships) in 1972 all served to give South Vietnam a fighting chance...

...military activity...

...0/ n thinking about Hitler and Stalin, perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind is that, under normal circumstances, neither man would have amounted to much...

...Isaacson rummages around in Kissinger's intellectual past in a vain attempt to understand him...

...Isaacson undercuts his own argument by showing how close Kissinger continued to be to his parents throughout his career, even having the impertinence to criticize him for his "sentimental streak" in this regard...

...He nonetheless is consistently supercilious and moralistic, and follows Hersh in portraying Kissinger as a devious, obsequious fellow always eager to play both sides of the street...

...Anything Kissinger says or does¡ªwhether as an adolescent or as a young man or as a university professor¡ªis treated as a signpost for what was to come in the Nixon White House...

...Metternich, Spengler, Bismarck, Kant are all trotted out to no particular purpose, other than to suggest that Kissinger was somehow "European" or "pessimistic" or uninterested in noble goals like human rights...

...The war might have been won in 1969...

...He gleefully reports that a number of Rand Corporation luminaries hated the book, but never explains why...

...L ike Stalin, Hitler had an exalted sense of personal destiny...

...Richard Nixon even granted the author no less than three interviews...

...To Kissinger, granting the Soviet Union due acknowledgment as a superpower with its sphere of interest went hand-inhand with the United States acting without guilt within its own sphere of interest...

...Who are these people anyway...

...And this has nothing to do with their alleged devious style, which was certainly no greater than that of their predecessors...

...Yet liberals have serious problems with Nixon and Kissinger...

...But few of them would have the audacity and perseverance to negotiate the most esoteric issues with the most obdurate prevaricators in the world...

...What liberals did not like about the Nixon Administration was that for all the modish rhetoric of "charting a new course," its actual foreign policy continued to be stubborn old "containment," updated to take into account the American elite's willingness to finish runner-up in the Cold War...

...Cambodia inextricably became ensnared in the Vietnam conflict it had avoided for so long...

...As he watched South Vietnam collapse and millions of its people fall under the sway of the most brutal kind of Communist dictatorship, Kissinger distinguished himself from many in Washington by passing up the opportunity to indulge in such frivolous and sententious reflections...

...Exactly...

...He recounts the familiar allegation that in the 1968 presidential election Kissinger offered his services to both Nixon and Humphrey...

...To Kissinger, the SALT and ABM treaties were a way to prevent the Soviets from continuing with their missile buildup during the years in which the United States had no new missile program in the works and was reluctant to go ahead with ABM development...

...There are many intellectuals...

...No, it was the United States's faltering attempts to preserve Cambodia's sovereignty that did the trick...

...Once Congress outlawed the use of force in Indochina, the fall of South Vietnam became inevitable, an outcome Isaacson dismisses with predictable smugness: "When the U.S...

...The post-Vietnam era was not the most successful one for the spread of American "global influence...

...And it was precisely because authority had crumbled and the future was up for grabs that misfits like Hitler and Stalin could scale the heights of power...

...He traces the familiar path of Kissinger's career through Harvard, where along the way he picks up the usual malicious academic backbiting...

...As for the troop withdrawals, their popularity ensured their continuation, regardless of the military consequences...

...As the distinguished British historian Alan Bullock observes in his remarkable story of history's two pre-eminent geniuses of evil, "To anyone who came across either of them before the age of thirty, a suggestion that he would play a major role in twentieth century history would have appeared incredible...

...The suggestion that national inter ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡est should prevail over ideology had also become liberal orthodoxy, as the bloody mess in Indochina appeared to be bringing the Cold War "containment" policy into disrepute...

...Liberals always hated this aspect of detente...

...He even puts forward the notion shared by Senator John Kerry that had this been done all of the American POWs would have been released, just like that...

...The rift with China meant that the Marxist-Leninist world was so divided that we no longer had to worry about Communists running around in Rome or Saigon or Managua or Santiago...

...First, he follows William Shawcross in charging that it was the bombing that led the "Communist camps to disperse over a larger area...

...K issinger has had many critics among both liberals and conservatives...

...For Stalin, who was ten years older than Hitler, a career as a professional revolutionary seemed perfectly natural...

...Isaacson haughtily dismisses Kissinger's "tendency to see complex local struggles in an East-West context...

...An indignant Isaacson announces that Kissinger "minimized the traumas he faced as a child...

...Lenin, as a role model...

...But Stalin's failure to play a significant role in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 inflicted a terrible, totally unacceptable blow to his self-esteem...

...They left their sanctuaries, invaded the Cambodian interior, and besieged Phnom Penh...

...Stalin's idolization of Lenin led him to see himself¡ªand yearn to be seen by others¡ªas Lenin's chief lieutenant and heir-apparent...

...Kissinger's desire for social and political acceptance¡ªand his yearning to be liked¡ªwas unusually ardent, so much so that it led him to compromise his beliefs at times...

...Then there was his outrageous reluctance to think of himself as a victim...

...Within the administration itself there was resistance to "linkage...

...What is different is the slipperiness of his method...

...Certainly Nixon would have had problems with Congress and the media, but he was to get that anyway...

...Unless, of course, the books he writes are poor stuff, only good for giving him fifteen minutes of fame apiece...

...This career came to nothing, but the Vienna years were hardly wasted...

...The policy came to be known as "linkage...

...In claiming to be seeking nothing more than a balance of power, the Nixon Administration was contenting itself with a modest aspiration...

...Instead, the Vietnamese Communists launched an assault on the Cambodian government...

...What made the Paris Agreement possible was not the goodwill of Moscow but the efficacious use of force in Indochina...

...And putting forward the image of a strong President would only have improved his standing in the polls...

...Such assumptions have been fashionable for years, and Isaacson gives every indication of sharing most of them...

...Stalin might have enjoyed a brief fling as a Caucasian bandit-chieftain...

...Soon this argument becomes too ludi crous even for Isaacson, and he changes tack to suggest that it would have been better to have let Hanoi take over in 1970 than have the Khmer Rouge come to power in 1975...

...In giving short shrift to this reasoning, Isaacson presents arguments of his own that are laughably confused...

...Isaacson's biography is far more balanced than Seymour Hersh's exercise in sustained viciousness, The Price of Power...

...Their policy combined escalation against¡ªand concessions to¡ªNorth Vietnam with promises of arms control treaties and trade agreements to the Soviet Union...

...For it...

...But he promptly lapses into sterile cynicism again, funny but wrong-headed: "Those interested in the arts would 12e strongly discouraged from pursuing any of the arts...

...forces went into Cambodia to save it from being taken over by the North Vietnamese, "the nation's descent into hell had begun...

...Consumed by feelings of class hatred, convinced that he was destined for greatness, "Stalin emerged as a rough, coarse, difficult man whose original motivation as a revolutionary was colored far more by hatred and resentment than by idealism...

...The State Department, Kissinger noted, "was most eager for liberalizing East-West trade unilaterally . . . and above all for beginning SALT as soon as possible...

...In fact, they express the standard post-Vietnam liberal position: Anti-Communism and the U.S...

...It is true that the North Vietnamese were a less gruesome crowd than the Cambodian Communists...

...It would certainly have been odd to try to save South Vietnam from North Vietnamese Communists but not Cambodia...

...The most scathing pages of Kissinger are devoted to Senator Henry Jackson who, in linking U.S.-Soviet trade agreements with the exit of Soviet Jews, was precisely trying to add a moral dimension to American foreign policy...

...Isaacson is an assistant managing editor of Time and it may be that these last sentences are the sort of bland equivocations to be expected from anyone who has put in time at that magazine...

...D¨¦tente's enthusiasts, however, saw it as a means of ending it...

...Perhaps if education¡ªincluding art education¡ªwere better, the melancholy proposition that drives these lectures, "Today, where literature was, movies are," might be at least partly reversed...

...You can't go into a fight with them, or have a feast with them...

...A riskier alternative would have been for the administration to lead, rather than follow, public opinion...

...And the authors arrived at this conclusion: "All in all, it can be argued that by failing to anticipate the consequences of their words and actions, [the Wise Men] sowed the seeds of both the Vietnam tragedy and, ultimately, their own undoing...

...After giving the impression that this did indeed happen, Isaacson admits that no evidence has come to light to support his charge...

...Then he wouldn't have to worry about competition from television and movies...

...Yet surprise should have been in order...

...Bullock argues that the "trauma" of being overshadowed by Trotsky and others at the decisive moment in the party's history is a "key to the understanding of Stalin's psychological development...

...But the greater truth is that, though arts cannot be taught, art appreciation can, and without a public informed about art and able to discriminate between the genuine and W hen Walter Isaacson set out to write this biography, he had no trouble getting Henry Kissinger's full cooperation...

...Isaacson accounts for everything he dislikes about Kissinger's foreign policy in terms of his personality, and accounts for Kissinger's personality in terms of his childhood experiences...

...saacson, needless to say, subscribes to the conventional view that America's cause in Vietnam was hopeless and that the only reasonable policy the Nixon Administration could have pursued was unilateral withdrawal...

...Just as he was a natural revolutionary, Stalin was a natural Bolshevik, and he came to regard the Bolshevik leader, Joseph Shattan, a former speechwriter for Vice President Quayle, is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia...

...Isaacson offers his own answer: "Linkage was becoming a looking-glass phenomenon: the American side was the one that seemed more eager for a summit, and Moscow even had the audacity to send a note warning Washington that restraint in the face of Hanoi's invasion would improve its prospects at the May summit...

...Martov, Dan and Axelrod are circumcised Yids...

...But a few pages later, Isaacson is contradicting himself again...

...One need only compare Isaacson's biography with Kissinger's own memoirs to realize the extent to which Kissinger towers over his contemporaries...

...Kissinger has written with some justice of the pressures the Nixon Administration was under to go that extra mile to improve relations with the Soviet Union...

...D¨¦tente, arms control, the opening to China, the liquida tion of America's involvement in Vietnam were all things lib erals had been pining for...

...But if that was so, why would the Russians risk jeopardizing the May 1972 Moscow summit¡ªout of which would come SALT and lucrative trade agreements¡ªby sanctioning Hanoi's 1972 invasion...

...Kissinger's mind is rich and complex...

...And that old woman Zasulich...

...Unfortunately, the times in which Stalin and Hitler came to maturity were not normal...

...The problem was not that it was too complicated but that it was never really tried...

...This will save many people from lifelong disappointment while limiting production, in the most Darwinian way, to the born artist who cannot be discouraged...

...It is of a piece with his almost exclusive interest in gossip and office politics...

...But since the Khmer Rouge were clients of the North Vietnamese, it is difficult to see how anyone in 1970 could have sat around and made these nice distinctions...

...commitments overly sweeping," that "they bore part of George Szamuely is a writer living in New York City...

...Even they would have been unattainable, according to both Nixon and Kissinger, had the administration not escalated U.S...

...Any White House directive to the contrary was interpreted with the widest possible latitude if it was not ignored altogether...

...In which case he may profit more from the status quo...

...The authors, for instance, found that their subjects "made anti-Communism dangerously rigid and U.S...

...No, it was the Russians who helped out...

...A little later, though, he admits that the critical event took place not in 1969, but in April 1970 when Marshal Lon Nol, the new Cambodian chief, "ordered the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to leave Cambodia immediately...

...As for Lenin's rivals in the Russian Social Democratic movement, the Mensheviks, Stalin's attitude is well illustrated in an address to Georgian workers that he delivered in 1905: Lenin is outraged that God sent him such comrades as the Mensheviks...

...the phony, we end up in the muck we are sloshing about in today...

...Russia was ravaged by war and revolution...

...The bombing moratorium originating from the last days of LBJ could have been lifted and the so-called "honeymoon period" used for the launch of a massive offensive against North Vietnam...

...Germany by defeat and depression...

...He accepts that by signing the 1973 Paris Agreement, the North Vietnamese had accepted the existence of a non-Communist regime in Saigon for the first time...

...Cowards and peddlers...

...Nor was there any serious danger of the United States halting troop withdrawals because Hanoi was showing signs of increasing belligerence...

...Nor does it have anything to do with their lack of internationalist goals like human rights...

...Some of them see his escape from memory as a key to his legendary insecurities...

...But what is truly remarkable about him is his worldliness...

...That is why Kissinger, unlike many in Washington at the time, was so alarmed at the prospect of Communists coming to power in France, Italy, Portugal, or Chile...

...The war widened...

...Then Vidal would not have to lament that he is no longer "a famous novelist": "I am still alive but my category is not...

...A pam pered child of middle-class parents, he spent his formative years as a vagabond in Vienna, where he was forced to rub shoulders with all sorts of riffraff while pursuing an imaginary career as an artist...

...favors...

...Instead of victory, however, we got the 1973 Paris Accords...

...Hitler might have attained a certain notoriety in the political underworld of Central Europe...

...Typically, he has nothing to say about how Kissinger's intellectual development shaped his actions in power...

...Meanwhile, the opening to China would ensure that the two Communist giants would each try to Outbid the other for U.S...

...What Isaacson will not entertain is the argument that Nixon and Kissinger tried to act honorably toward an ally while also securing the United States's own interests...

...But they are not the best qualification for writing biographies of the principal figures of the Cold War...

...Again and again, Isaacson repeats that "Hanoi was being isolated internationally," that "trade benefits .. . had been the quid pro quo for Moscow's tacit help in the 1972 Vietnam negotiations...

...Since it was this book that launched Kissinger's career as a policy-maker, Isaacson's omission is all the more reprehensible...

...A s for Kissinger's years in power, Isaacson's psychologizing foreshadows the inevitable litany of charges that he will level...

...A merican foreign policy during the Kissinger years has always left liberals in a quandary...

...In May 1970, when U.S...

...Try to work with them...

...The problem is that Isaacson presents so many mutually incompatible characterizations that one gets the impression that even after completing a massive biography he still does not have a clue as to what his subject is really about...

...It led him to embark on a long and tortuous campaign to eliminate his rivals, gain control of the party, launch a "Second Revolution" against the peasantry, and thus come to be seen, finally, as Lenin's equal¡ªhis rightful heir and legitimate successor...

...This argument seems debatable, to say the least...

...But Isaacson has to build his case...

...There was never any serious danger of the United States walking out of the SALT negotiations because the Soviets were being insufficiently cooperative on Vietnam...

...Kissinger saw d¨¦tente as a means of continuing the struggle with Communism...

...On the one hand, they liked the goals...

...But only liberals have repeatedly and unfairly called into question his sense of honor and seriousness of purpose...

...But he has to prove that this had nothing to do with the defeat of Hanoi's 1972 offensive and its fear of a re-elected Nixon's launch of a major bombing campaign...

...Cl the responsibility for creating a world divided between East and West, overarmed and perpetually hovering at the brink...

...Such a characterization might sound plausible if one did not know anything at all about Kissinger...

...There is a kind of callous near-truth to this...

...He never followed the fashions of the times to question the very premises of American Cold War foreign policy...

...The child who had to pretend to be someone else so that he could get into soccer games . . . became an adult who was prone to deceit and self-deception in the pursuit of acceptance...

...Given the reception of The Wise Men (1986)¡ªthe story of six of the leading architects of the United States's Cold War foreign policy, which Isaacson co-authored with Evan Thomas¡ªsuch assistance is not surprising: that book was almost universally praised for its scrupulous objectivity, its monumental scope, and its lively, lucid style...

...His] childhood friends," he continues, "regard [this] as an act of denial and self-delusion...

...When it comes to the issue of the so-called "secret" bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1969, Isaacson is at his most devious...

...Every dire prediction of those opposed to the invasion came true...

...In other words, it was not the North Vietnamese attempt to take over Cambodia that "ensnared" that nation in "the Vietnam conflict...

...government finally abandoned its policy of force in Indochina," he muses, "it was slowly able to rehabilitate its reputation at home and abroad, which was probably the best way to increase its global influence...

...Stalin had an intense hatred of authority, "not so much in principle," Bullock notes, "as in its exercise over him by others...