Barry Gewen > Quotes

“unlike so many political scientists of the time, Kissinger believed the study of history was essential for an understanding of international relations. The past was never past. History taught complexity and contingency, the way political and military leaders went about selecting among indeterminate options in the particular circumstances they faced and the mistakes they often committed as individuals making individual choices. There was no escaping uncertainty; tragedy was an ever-constant presence in human affairs. One obtained from the past not abstract formulas to be applied mechanically to modern-day problems but a flexible awareness of the human condition that could enrich the decision-making process. “History teaches by analogy, not identity,” Kissinger wrote. “This means that the lessons of history are never automatic.” Needless to say, Kissinger was no more enamored of quantitative thinking than Morgenthau.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Part of the magic was that Hitler told people what they wanted to hear. His pronouncements were not a challenge but a confirmation of his followers’ assumptions and preconceptions, an incitement to cast off the dreary restrictions of civility and rationality and allow their emotions full Dionysiac release, above all a permission both to maintain hope in the face of obdurate reality and to hate anyone or anything that was perceived to undermine that hope. Catholics, Socialists, and Communists, with intellectual structures of their own, were not as susceptible to him. He appealed to a devastated populace that, like him, had lost everything, including their established beliefs, felt a profound sense of grievance, and found consolation in a pan-Germanism that was part sentimentality and part utopianism, a sort of forward-looking nostalgia. The content of the speeches was important to that degree.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“In contrast to so many Americans, Kissinger has lived without hope, without expectations, and certainly without confidence in either the workings of democracy or the inevitability of progress.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Nixon was not entirely wrong when, in his typical fashion, he attributed the opposition to straightforward self-interest and selfishness. The students simply did not want to fight for their country—and he could point out that the demonstrations fell off after he stopped sending draftees to Vietnam. But then one had to explain why previous generations had willingly, even enthusiastically, gone off to do battle in World War I, World War II, and the Korean war while the generation opposing the Vietnam war did not. Those war supporters who followed the logic of their argument through were left complaining about a coddled and spoiled generation so different from what came to be known as the “Greatest Generation,” a growing decadence, an America gone soft, accompanied by Spenglerian laments about the decline of the West. Nixon thought that modern education was undermining the national spirit. “The more a person is educated, he becomes brighter in the head and weaker in the spine,” and he said he thanked God that there were still “uneducated people” around to support him and the war. They were “all that’s left of the character of this nation.” Abraham Lincoln would have been “ruined” if he had had more education, Nixon said.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“By the same token, the failure to control Hitler after he was released from prison looks unreasonable only with the certainty of hindsight. Through the mid-1920s, he was banned from speaking in most German states, but as time passed and memories of the putsch receded, the bans began to be lifted. After all, Hitler was now pledging to abide by the rules of legality, and how, in a democracy, could a politician be denied the right to be heard, no matter how insidious his message, if he stayed within the bounds of the law? Who—and by what authority—had the right to silence him? Saxony, at the start of 1927, was the first large state to lift the speaking prohibition and was followed by Bavaria and others. The last to do so was the all-important state of Prussia, by far the largest in the federation (“whoever possesses Prussia possesses the Reich,” Goebbels said). It held out until after the September 1928 elections, when the Nazis won a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote, but after that dismal showing its prohibition looked untenable, a restriction based on bad faith and sheer partisan politics. Such a feeble electoral result brought the question of free speech in a democratic system into clear focus. In 1928, the Nazis seemed less a threat to democracy than a spent force, while the Weimar Republic seemed to have put down genuine roots. Real wages were rising. Unemployment had dropped dramatically. Industrial production had climbed 25 percent since 1925. “For the first time since the war, the German people were happy,” one journalist wrote. The astute political economist Joseph Schumpeter said in early 1929 that Weimar had achieved an “impressive stability” and that “in no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.” The real threat to democracy during these good times appeared to be not Hitler or his party but any bans on the leaders of political organizations. Of course, two years later, after the Nazis had grown to become the second largest party in the Reichstag, it was too late to outlaw them.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“But once it was conceded that Kissinger operated from a Realpolitik framework with intellectual, even moral principles of its own that were larger than himself or his personal advantage, then difficult questions about which decisions best served American interests or humanitarian ends were open to debate. Judgment calls weren’t the same as the perpetration of crimes (although some Realpolitikers were sure to recall Talleyrand’s words upon hearing of the murder of the Duc D’Enghien: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder”). Because Kissinger’s leftist critics didn’t accept Realism as a legitimate basis for foreign policy, they didn’t see any need to debate matters of judgment. What was more, locked in their partisan cocoons, they had trouble acknowledging that policymakers frequently made those judgment calls in a fog of ambiguity, in which outcomes could not be predicted and the ethics of a situation could point in several directions at once. “Statesmanship,” Kissinger said, “needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes.” But what the left craved, what they insisted on, was moral certainty in an uncertain world, or what Kissinger, in a combative mood, called “a nihilistic perfectionism.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“In a profile of Robert Kennedy, Morgenthau explained how emotion, even in the best of causes, could obscure reason and rationality, and what he said about Kennedy applied to the student demonstrators as well: “Robert Kennedy was not reflective but emotional,” Morgenthau remarked. When he saw evil and suffering in the world, he felt he had to do something. “But since he was unaware of the ambiguity of moral judgments, he was also unaware of the moral and pragmatic ambiguity of the political act performed in emotional response to a moral judgment. His approach was morally fundamentalist and politically simplistic.” Much like the student protesters, many of whom became Kennedy followers after he came to share their passion about the war. Moral fundamentalism and perfectionism were their credo. Emotion, not reflection, determined a policy of resistance that was no-policy. Except for a shared opposition to the Vietnam war, the stern, Nietzschean, hyperintellectual Morgenthau and the idealistic, impassioned students had almost nothing in common. Their intellectual premises barely overlapped; their mind-sets functioned in different universes. As Morgenthau had written in Politics Among Nations, “A man who was nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool.” The students were “moral men” and proud of the fact. And then in 1968, as if to pound his point home, Morgenthau took a step that would have been incomprehensible to most of them. He came out in support of Richard Nixon for president.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Perhaps the creeping effort to restrict civil liberties wouldn’t have brought people into the streets, at least not immediately. But Allende’s economic programs hit them directly. His announced policy of “first consumption, then accumulation” was an economic disaster waiting to happen. In 1971, the inflation rate was 20 percent, kept somewhat in check by the expenditure of the government’s foreign reserves, but in 1972, with the government spending lavishly to support its social and economic policies, it jumped to 78 percent, and in 1973 to an unprecedented 353 percent. No country in the world had a higher rate. Then the attempt to rein in prices through government controls led to shortages of basic consumer goods and the rise of black markets. People were waiting in line to buy toothpaste.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“What happens, Kissinger asked, “if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one?” In this system there was little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition. Hard facts bred a tyranny of their own that prioritized the immediate present over an understanding of the past or a sensitivity toward the future. Focus groups and opinion polls replaced individual decision-making and responsibility; the immediate headline-driven mood of the crowd overrode long-range perspective. Foreign policy was “in danger of turning into a subdivision of short-term domestic politics” in which “the quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions.” The United States was in danger of “careening through crises without comprehending them.” This was no way for a great power to engage with the rest of the world, least of all in a world armed with nuclear weapons.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Remarkably, the man so often condemned for his cutthroat striving didn’t leap at the offer. He asked for a week to think it over—not because of any doubts he may have had about himself but because of his doubts about Nixon. Kissinger dwelt in the hothouse bubble of Cambridge, where a contemptuous attitude toward all things Nixonian was the ticket of entry to polite Harvard society. Kissinger’s friends, among them such Democratic stalwarts as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, were almost all dedicated liberals and, “to a man,” Kissinger said, had voted against Nixon. Kissinger himself shared their view. During the campaign, he had called Nixon “unfit to be president” and “a disaster” waiting to happen. Just before the Republican convention he had declared that “Richard Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president.” (Such opinions didn’t prevent him from providing help to the Republicans during the campaign, but then nobody ever claimed that Henry Kissinger was straightforward.)”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Americans were deluded, Arendt insisted, if they thought their political institutions were meant to establish a democracy. That was never the intent of the Founding Fathers, who had read the ancient Greeks attentively and worried as much about tyrannical majorities as did German-Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s popular and populist regime. They were kindred spirits. “What men” they were, Arendt exclaimed in breathless admiration of the Founders, and how little understood in modern times, with its ethos of democratic egalitarianism. The recent arrival felt obliged to lecture her native-born countrymen by reminding them about their true history. “It’s a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of minorities.” Such words had an oddly familiar ring at the time, though emanating from a political corner far removed from Arendt and her friends. “A republic, not a democracy” was the rallying cry of the extreme, often loony, reactionaries gathered around the John Birch Society during the 1950s and after. But though Arendt, with her stress on individual freedom, shared language and even long-term worries with the far right, she could never be mistaken for one of them—not with her contempt for bourgeois, money-obsessed self-interest, her support for trade unions, her identification with the weak and vulnerable, her anti-anti-Communism, her determined pluralism, and her praise of immigration as the means by which the United States continually revitalized itself. The “magnificence” of the country, she said, “consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not shut itself off from the outside world.” (She also said that the attempt to equate freedom with free enterprise was a “monstrous falsehood.”) In”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“What did Strauss mean by philosophy? Not what it was commonly understood to be. Philosophers were not to be found teaching in colleges and universities around the country because instructors in philosophy departments were no more likely to be true philosophers than instructors in art departments were to be true artists. Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom, like that of the prototype Socrates, consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was of the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers, Strauss said, when certainty replaced Socratic doubt. Monk-like, they pursued a contemplative life of reasoned discussion and disputation about that which they did not know, far from the meaningless bustle of the everyday world. Their advantage over the ignorant masses was their intellectual humility. All”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“conservatives (or conservative nationalists) who became Nazis out of what Hermann Rauschning calls “the best of motives.” Rauschning joined the party in the early 1930s and became the Nazi mayor of the city of Danzig, believing in “the eternal values of the nation” and “a political order rooted in the nation.” He had a personal relationship with Hitler but soon discovered that his aims for Germany were not the Nazis’ aims, and in 1934 he left the party and fled to Switzerland. National Socialism, he had concluded, was not a conservative movement but a revolutionary one, “the destroyer of all order and all the things of the mind.” The only thing it understood was force and it held to no beliefs other than the acquisition of power and then more power. Rauschning was prescient enough to see that there was nothing to prevent the unscrupulous, nihilistic Hitler from forming an alliance with his supposed archenemy, Stalin. In a widely read book, The Revolution of Nihilism, published in 1938, he issued a warning that many did not wish to hear. The West, he said, had to prepare for “a clear, open, absolutely unflinching struggle” against the Nazis. For “nothing, not even the threat of world war, will deter them from their course.” Then”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“He knew how to work a crowd and how to package himself as a celebrity. It didn’t matter what the press said about him, he told an associate. “The main thing is that they mention us.” Now let us contemplate one simple but remarkable fact: the Nazis charged entrance fees to Hitler’s speeches! Is there any other politician of the twentieth century who would be considered worth spending money to hear? Churchill at his best, perhaps, though not on so regular a basis as Hitler or with his frequency. Churchill wasn’t the polished performer that Hitler was—just think of the difference in their body language. And before Donald Trump, perhaps, it’s impossible to imagine any modern American candidate for office asking people to pay for the privilege of listening to him try to win their political support.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Inevitably,” Morgenthau wrote, “if your ambition is not limited to scholarship but extends to the political sphere, you have to trim your sails to the prevailing winds.” Kissinger, he said, had trimmed his sails with “sagacity and decency,” and he reproached envious academics who saw nothing but opportunism and careerism. Much of the criticism of Kissinger, he insisted, was “unabashedly self-serving.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“When Morgenthau surveyed the contemporary United States in The Purpose of American Politics, what he saw wasn’t pretty. Americans were materialistic, hedonistic, and apathetic, their only aim in life apparently to consume more and more in a complacent haze of unconstrained appetite. The economy was wasteful, the government paralyzed. The public sphere had virtually disappeared as individuals struggled to grab what they could for themselves and the hell with anyone else or any larger purpose. Public policy was determined by moneyed pressure groups with no concerns beyond their own parochial interests, and morality consisted of what you could get away with. Americans no longer made any distinction between freedom and license, and the consequences for the country were bound to be dire. “No society,” Morgenthau warned, “can go on like this forever without decay following stagnation; the fate of Spain tells us what is in store for such a nation.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“LITTLE IN FOREIGN POLICY is hard and fast, black and white. It’s almost always possible to find ambiguity, contingency, shades of gray, reasons for doubt or dispute. That said, for purposes of this discussion, there are certain outlooks that have to be considered out of bounds on the question of Chile and Allende—two in particular held by many of those passionately opposed to American intervention. The first outlook is propounded by people who don’t take the idea of American interests seriously. It includes the absolute pacifists who are opposed to the use of power in any case. More significant are those opposed to American interests as a matter of principle, who are, to put it as bluntly as possible, anti-American. Obviously, great numbers of non-Americans belong in this category, understandably, because the interests of the United States are not their concern. But it includes many Americans as well. Their thinking goes as follows: even if the United States makes a reasoned calculation about which policy better serves its national interests, those interests are necessarily illegitimate or malevolent; Washington will always act on behalf of American imperialism or to preserve the evil of capitalism. Policy for these people is a pseudo-Marxist zero-sum game in which the maintenance or increase in American influence and power is invariably a minus in any moral calculation and a reason for opposition.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Perhaps most important, Strauss, Arendt, and Kissinger all started out in America in the same place, rejecting the ideologies that provided the grounding for the vast majority of their fellow German-Jewish émigrés. They were neither Marxists nor Zionists (though all felt a deep emotional attachment to Israel), nor did they adopt the quasi-official ideology of the United States, liberal democracy. What was left for them? Arendt provided the most succinct and memorable answer: all three engaged in what she called “thinking without a banister.” In”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Sometimes, as in the case of the copper companies, the nationalizations were achieved through legislation that won overwhelming support. (By now, no one in Chile loved the American companies; even the head of Chile’s Roman Catholic bishops declared that nationalization was right and just.) At other times the methods skirted or even overstepped the bounds of legality. The government would simply approve the seizures of farms and factories, one of those “loopholes” Allende was relying on. Perhaps the most important—and pernicious—method was by squeezing the companies economically, as he tried to do with El Mercurio. The government had the authority to approve price hikes and wage increases. Companies that were targets for takeovers were prohibited from raising their prices but were forced to raise their workers’ pay. Moreover, as the government extended its control of the banks, credit for distressed companies dried up. Forced bankruptcies were a favorite tool of Allende’s Socialists. And who was there to run these companies once they were taken over? Ambassador Davis reports: “Government-appointed managers were usually named on the basis of a political patronage system that would have put Tammany Hall to shame.” Many formerly profitable companies were soon incurring heavy losses. In the countryside, where peasants—often illiterate—were seizing control of the estates, there was resistance even to the simplest methods of accounting and cost calculation. As Allende told Debray, “We shall have real power when copper and steel are under our control, when saltpeter is genuinely under our control, when we have put far-reaching land reform measures into effect, when we control imports and exports through the state, when we have collectivized a major portion of our national production.” But it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also taking steps to centralize the government and restrict political freedom. He saw his most important political reform as replacing the bicameral legislature with a single chamber in order to strengthen the presidency and weaken congress’s ability to block his objectives. It would also have the power to override judicial decisions. He called the proposed new body the “People’s Assembly,” but he never gained sufficient support from the “people” to call a plebiscite on the question.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“There was worse. Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions. For those bounded by a belief in common morality, which is to say just about everyone, philosophers were immoralists or, at best, amoralists. These suspicions of the general public were not unfounded. Philosophers really were subversive! (Here, too, Strauss and Arendt shared a common—one might say Nietzschean—perspective. “Thinking,” Arendt wrote, “inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics.”) To survive in a world intrinsically hostile to freethinking, philosophers had to employ “esoteric writing” while presenting a public face of moderation and quiescence, whatever radical ideas they might be harboring. “Thought must be not moderate, but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.” Or as Strauss also put it: “In political things it is a sound rule to let sleeping dogs lie.” The best hope for the preservation of freedom of thought was to remain inconspicuous. The wise knew not to poke the beast. Inconspicuousness was not always possible. Constantly vulnerable to tyrants and to tyrannical majorities, philosophers were in need of friends, not only other philosophers with whom they could exchange ideas but also more practical people who could mediate between the contemplative elite and the vulgar masses. The philosophers’ best friends in the ordinary world were the people Strauss called “gentlemen.” Philosophers were not equipped to plunge into the political world, which consisted of “very long conversations with very dull people on very dull subjects.” Neither did they have the power to impose their will on the majority even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t. Instead, they needed the help of gentlemen who appreciated the value of freedom of thought yet could function among the ignorant populace. Philosophers, who were disinterested by definition, could instruct these gentlemen to shun private advantage and personal gain for the common good—and it would help if the gentlemen were wealthy so that the prospect of acquiring riches at the public expense would be less enticing—but it was up to the gentlemen to act as the bridge between the pure thinking of the minority and the material self interest of the majority and to win the support of the citizenry at large.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Morgenthau never forgot a comment President Kennedy had once made to him after he had written something critical about the administration. “You should sit where I do,” Kennedy said to him. “He had a point,” Morgenthau conceded, and he went on to write thoughtful essays on the ways in which intellectuals and politicians both overlapped and differed and about the hopeless complexities of “the collaboration problem.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“THAT ESSENTIAL QUALITY of sympathy was never absent from Morgenthau’s relationship with Hannah Arendt, colored, it should be said, by an element of the erotic. They met in the early 1950s and developed an unshakeable friendship that lasted up to her death in 1975. Hans Jonas, who had known Arendt since their student days in Germany during the 1920s and who saw her every day when they were both attending the University of Marburg, remembered that “it was almost to be taken for granted that men of high intelligence and sensibility would be enchanted by Hannah.” Morgenthau was enchanted. “What struck one at first meeting Hannah Arendt,” he recalled, was “the vitality of her mind, quick—sometimes too quick—sparkling, seeking and finding hidden meanings and connections beneath the surface of man and things.” She had an extraordinary depth of knowledge combined with rare intellectual passion. “As others enjoy playing cards or the horses for their own sake, so Hannah Arendt enjoyed thinking.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Intellectuals were important to policymaking, providing concepts and perspective, but they operated on the basis of different values from politicians. Scholars engaged with ideas, their aim was to be as intelligent as they could and to present their arguments cogently. Statesmen had different goals. “The intellectual seeks truth,” Morgenthau said, “the politician power.” But Morgenthau was quick to add that this difference did not make the intellectual superior to the politician because power was an inescapable reality while the abstruse pursuit of truth carried burdens of its own. The politician was obliged to deal with facts, not theories, and facts had a tendency to “make mincemeat of the wrong ideas.” Intellectuals could be very smart without necessarily being especially wise, or even wise at all. The politician required “practical wisdom,” whereas the scholar or intellectual “may be intelligent without being wise in the ways of the world.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“More than half of the Christian Democrats’ funds came from the United States. According to the Church report, the CIA, besides supporting the Christian Democrats, “mounted a massive anti-Communist propaganda campaign. Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers and wall painting.” In the first week of the CIA’s efforts, in June 1964, the agency produced 20 radio spots a day in Santiago and 12-minute news reports broadcast five times a day on three different Santiago stations. Activities in the provinces were even more extensive. To those inclined to react with indignation or outrage at Washington’s interventions, it is important to point out that Chile was hardly virgin territory whose purity was violated only by the intrusive, predatory United States. The Soviet Union and Cuba were doing their utmost to back Allende. If virtue was defined by a lack of foreign intervention, then nobody, inside Chile or out, could be said to be clothed in virtue. But even if critics are reluctant to celebrate it, the American covert effort can be seen as one of the great foreign policy success stories of the 1960s: Frei won the election with 56 percent of the vote compared to 39 percent for Allende. Afterward, Frei thanked the Americans for their help, though almost no one, including Frei himself, knew just how extensive that help was. The CIA, which did know, congratulated itself as one of the “indispensable ingredients in Frei’s success.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“She was wrong, too, when the Kennedy assassination left her thinking that “what is at stake is no more nor less than the existence of the republic.” Worse was to come. The turmoil of the 1960s made her perpetually ill at ease, wondering if she should start packing her bags again. The Vietnam war was tearing the country apart. Racial tensions were boiling over. The campuses were exploding, the cities deteriorating. Public services like transportation and the mails were falling apart, and crime was out of control. By the start of 1968, she said, she knew of many native-born Americans, not just German-Jewish émigrés, who were thinking of leaving the country. And the nation’s urban problems were having a direct impact: New York City was becoming too much for her. In 1968, she and her husband considered abandoning their Upper West Side apartment to find “more comfort than is possible in big cities,” and a few years later she survived an attempted mugging, though not without psychological damage. She became fearful of venturing out onto New York’s dangerous streets. “For many years now, the law-enforcement agencies have been unable to enforce the statutes against drug traffic, mugging and burglary,” she said. “It looks like the end of the republic,” she wrote to McCarthy.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Kissinger observed, “Neither Churchill nor Lincoln nor Roosevelt was the product of a staff.” The modern bureaucracy simply rolled along according to its own predetermined rules, with no more head and no more heart than any other well-oiled machine. Kissinger called the ideal bureaucrat a “commissar,” and by that he didn’t mean only placeholders in the Soviet Union but bureaucrats in the United States as well. The commissar/bureaucrat was any administrator “whose world is defined by regulations, in whose making he had no part, and whose substance does not concern him, to whom reality is exhausted by the organization in which he finds himself.” The mentality of the commissar could result in the deaths of thousands, “without love and without hatred.” And even if the outcome was not murderous, the placeholder’s “impact on national policy is pernicious.” Standing against this entrenched bureaucracy was the autonomous intellectual. Some intellectuals insisted on preserving their freedom by remaining outside the governmental apparatus, but these people Kissinger criticized for “perfectionism,” or for engaging in protest that “has too often become an end in itself.” Kissinger preferred the collaborators who chose public service. Intellectuals, Kissinger insisted, should “not refuse to participate in policymaking, for to do so would confirm the administrative stagnation.” Still, those who did choose public service had their own problems to deal with.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Kissinger was true to his word, and during the 1968 presidential contest, after his favorite, Nelson Rockefeller, failed to win the Republican nomination, he covered all his bases. In a well-known and still controversial episode, he passed along information to the Nixon people about the Johnson administration’s last, and futile, efforts at negotiations with the North Vietnamese; he also offered to provide the Hubert Humphrey camp with the Rockefeller campaign’s files on Richard Nixon. “Six days a week I’m for Hubert,” he told a friend, “but on the seventh day I think they’re both awful.” Like Morgenthau, he reluctantly voted for Nixon—or so he says. In any case, Kissinger’s political double-dealing contributed to his winning the trust of the pathologically untrusting Nixon and landing the position of national security adviser with the new administration. Humphrey later said that if he had won the presidency he too would have appointed Kissinger national security adviser, suggesting two things: first, that Kissinger’s deviousness had paid off; second, that America’s Vietnam policy would not have been very different if Humphrey had been in the White House instead of Nixon.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“He called the tendency “nationalistic universalism,” and he observed that the more insecure citizens feel at home, the more “vicarious satisfaction” they take from projecting power abroad. This thought caused Morgenthau to wax Nietzschean: “Carrying their idols before them, the nationalistic masses of our time meet in the international arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandates of history, that it does for humanity what it seems to do for itself, and that it fulfills a sacred mission ordained by Providence, however defined. Little do they know that they meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed.” Leo”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“It was geography that mattered more than anything else in the relationship. Distances between Chile and the United States were simply too great for national interests to clash too seriously; pretty much all the two countries shared was the Western Hemisphere and an anticolonial birth. To most Chileans the North Americans were, in the words of one historian, “a cipher,” and most North Americans would have been hard-pressed to name a Chilean writer, musician, or politician, even the capital. “Chile” would never be a category on Jeopardy! It was just an oddly shaped country far to the south. Little wonder that Henry Kissinger, in one of his not infrequent moments of sarcasm, explained Chile’s importance to Washington’s policymakers by calling it “a dagger pointed straight at the heart of Antarctica.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

“Alsop rightly saw Morgenthau as one of the most influential leaders of the opposition to the war in Vietnam and, therefore, someone who had to be discredited with improbable charges of foolishness and appeasement. But the truth about Morgenthau’s position in the antiwar movement was complicated. He wasn’t really a protest leader. He stood almost alone among the dissenters. His power-oriented Realpolitik perspective was no more congenial to the student demonstrators than it was to the occupants of the White House. As a culturally sophisticated European of deep conservative instincts, Morgenthau saw the unruly students as little more than an embarrassment. “The New Left is essentially anarchistic,” he told a journalist, “a still-born movement that can have no influence on American politics.” He rejected the young leftists’ Marxist explanations that the war was economically determined. “From an economic point of view, the Vietnam war is an absurdity,” while so-called moral objections left him cold. For Morgenthau, opposition to the war could rest on one of three foundations: an economic one, an absolute moral one because “this kind of indiscriminate destruction cannot be condoned on any ground,” and his own pragmatic position that “this particular war” was not one the United States should be fighting. He distanced himself from so important a protest leader as Noam Chomsky because Chomsky was basing his opposition on a combination of the first two foundations—a “vulgar economic determinism” and a “moral absolutism.” He was even ready to rebuke Fulbright for being “dangerously naïve concerning the threat posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China.”
― Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World