This New Yorker essay-review of a new book on Henry Kissinger is okay, but not nearly as great as it could have been. The essay-review backs into Kissinger's ambition, his phony "realism" in foreign affairs, and the monstrous things he did as a National Security Council adviser to Nixon, and later Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford. What the essayist never quite understands, however, is Kissinger's place in American foreign policy of the past sixty-five years. The writer thinks Kissinger's influence is overstated in our popular perceptions, and that there is some mythology at work, as much from Kissinger as both his detractors and sycophants. This is close to reality, but not nearly enough. What needed to be made explicit is Kissinger is overrated in terms of any real knowledge about European history, his abjectly ignorant and racist assumptions about "Third World" history and politics, and how Kissinger was simply a very public part of the American foreign policy establishment. The essayist is correct Kissinger styled himself a "realist," and he was--though in a most cynical sense of self-promotion. Kissinger lacked Hans Morgenthau's and George Kennan's integrity, and that is why he is still feted among the elite power corridors in American political life through today.
The most insightful Kissinger biography remains Sy Hersh's 1983, The Price of Power, notwithstanding the New Yorker essayist's glib and highly inaccurate dismissal of Hersh's book. The essayist is wrong to dismiss Hersh's book as describing Kissinger as "an unhinged paranoiac." I read Hersh's book in its first release in 1983, and often used the book as a guide to which I returned again and again. In approaching Hersh's book for the first time, I did not come to the book as a newcomer on the subject, as I already had extensive knowledge about Kissinger, including reading various books on the Nixon administration, Nixon's foreign policy in Cambodia, Chile, Iran, and, of course, in Vietnam. In college, at Rutgers, I had read Kissinger's book on nuclear weapons, and had a professor at Rutgers who studied under Kissinger. The professor would tell us students stories about Kissinger, from the mundane, such as how boring Kissinger was as a lecturer, to more substantive information, including the details of the Nixon administration wiretaps on Kissinger's former subordinates at the National Security Council, including Roger Morris and Morton Halperin, who had naively joined Kissinger in working for the Nixon administration, thinking Kissinger was going to end the War Against Vietnam.
Other than the early life of Kissinger well told in this essay, not much dealt with in Hersh's book, it is Hersh's book which remains a powerful, wide-ranging, informative and exciting read. The essayist's description does no honest service in describing the book. There is information the essayist would have known had he truly engaged with Hersh's book. For example, Hersh had the goods on Kissinger playing double agent in advising the Humphrey and Nixon campaigns during the 1968 presidential election, making the supposition The New Yorker essayist makes about Kissinger likely getting a nod in a Humphrey administration more accurate than the essayist appears to know. Hersh also showed, contrary to Kissinger's denials, Kissinger went along with, and supported the wiretaps on his own aides. However, Hersh admits Kissinger had reason to believe Morris, Halperin, or Watts were the people leaking information about the Nixon administration's secret and illegal bombings of Cambodia to the New York Times reporters (Edwin Beecher and Hersh himself), though the wiretaps failed to show that. Hersh also understood, as did William Shawcross in Shawcross' book on Nixon's policies in Cambodia, that the idea for "Vietnamization" came from US Generals Abrams and Wheeler. The policy is not something Nixon or Kissinger thought up themselves. The idea was to increase bombings in North Vietnam, bomb the "sanctuaries" in Cambodia, and even bomb Laos--with the goal these peasants and their communist leaders would beg for peace on US terms. In pursuing this set of policies, these military and political leaders ignored our own military's analyses of bombings' effects on non-developed nations' civilian populations, which tends to be that such people become more entrenched, and feel they have nothing to lose by continuing the fight against a foreign invader. All of these men were highly overrated as military or political strategists, and operated from an assumption of racist superiority and cruelty.
The essence of Hersh's political-journalistic biography is that Kissinger was a player who rose to the top levels of the American military-industrial complex and establishment. Hersh also exposed Kissinger as overrated with respect to his historical scholarship, narcissistically arrogant, and an ass-kisser of those who held political power. It is a terrible thing for the essayist to reduce Hersh's book to a partial sentence that makes Hersh's book sound dramatically ridiculous.*
Overall, I found the essayist to have been unaware of what Chomsky correctly sees as continuities in American foreign policies. The focus on Kissinger as a merely self-promoting individual is fine as far as it goes. However, the essayist failed to see how Kissinger knew how to envelop himself within the heart of the American post-World War II foreign policy establishment, almost from the start of his career. The American Empire is a machine, though it is a machine which does not operate cleanly or efficiently in the sense of a lockstep. Nonetheless, there is a clear pattern of duplicity from foreign policy spokespeople and leaders. There is a pattern of the promotion of sociopaths who populate the foreign policy establishment, and those who promulgate policies which thrive on cruelty and destruction, nearly always in an effort to enforce corporate power and "expanded markets." There is rarely any public understanding of the various foreign policy moves as anything other than mere "mistakes" or seeing our mayhem, death, and destruction as somehow occurring because we are too nice. One has to read the internal memoranda, and parse the words of our leaders and their advisers, to see the ugliness and cruelty beneath. The New Yorker could have had any number of more informed writers review the new Kissinger biography, and failed in its choice of essayists.
* The irony, too, is the essayist may not have been aware of the novelist Joseph Heller's acerbic, brilliant novel, Good as Gold (1979), which was as thin a veiled attack on Kissinger as could be. Heller was incensed at the mythology surrounding Kissinger, particularly Marvin and Bernard Kalb's (two then-major television news reporters) ridiculously fawning biography of Kissinger. Heller knew a lot of insiders at Harvard, DC, and elsewhere, and did his own research into Kissinger, which led to the novel, which exposed Kissinger nearly as brilliantly as Hersh did four years later. And yes, I read that novel when it was released. I remember reading the novel in its initial release, and was stunned at how well Heller had captured Kissinger as Bruce Gold, the book's protagonist. Good as Gold was a type of novel more prevalent in the early 20th Century than by the late 1970s or certainly today, where a novelist takes a major or even not so major cultural or political figure, and sharpens their pen to puncture the person. The legendary journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, Ben Hecht, wrote Count Bruga (1926) and A Jew in Love (1931), which were thinly veiled attacks on political and cultural figures, one in Europe, and one in the US. A Jew in Love has very ugly anti-Semitic overtones, though Hecht was himself Jewish in his religious tradition. Hecht later repented about this, and became a devotee of the most reactionary and militant strains of Zionism, which is itself a wild topic to pursue additional reading. Somerset Maugham wrote a darkly mischievous take on Paul Gauguin, in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), which also provided a brilliant understanding of a tormented artist at work on his art. Maugham later wrote a whimsically mischievous take on the then-high and mighty, but late, British Empire era novelist, Hugh Walpole, in Cakes and Ale (1930), though some thought there were elements of the then only recently deceased, Thomas Hardy, of whom I remain a great fan, having read every Hardy novel, and a couple of biographies. These examples of this type of novel are only the ones I have read. There are many, many more of this type of novel in the history of novels over the past two centuries.
