Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

by Niall Ferguson

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger, based on unprecedented access to his private papers.Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award No American statesman has been as revered or as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Once hailed as “Super K”—the “indispensable man” whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama—he has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every “telcon” for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this magisterial two-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding.The first half of Kissinger’s life is usually skimmed over as a quintessential tale of American the Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who made it to the White House. But in this first of two volumes, Ferguson shows that what Kissinger achieved before his appointment as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser was astonishing in its own right. Toiling as a teenager in a New York factory, he studied indefatigably at night. He was drafted into the U.S. infantry and saw action at the Battle of the Bulge—as well as the liberation of a concentration camp—but ended his army career interrogating Nazis. It was at Harvard that Kissinger found his vocation. Having immersed himself in the philosophy of Kant and the diplomacy of Metternich, he shot to celebrity by arguing for “limited nuclear war.” Nelson Rockefeller hired him. Kennedy called him to Camelot. Yet Kissinger’s rise was anything but irresistible. Dogged by press gaffes and disappointed by “Rocky,” Kissinger seemed stuck—until a trip to Vietnam changed everything. The Idealist is the story of one of the most important strategic thinkers America has ever produced. It is also a political Bildungsroman, explaining how “Dr. Strangelove” ended up as consigliere to a politician he had always abhorred. Like Ferguson’s classic two-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds dazzling new light on an entire era. The essential account of an extraordinary life, it recasts the Cold War world.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, International Relations, Biography Memoir

1004 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 3, 2015

About the author

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC.

The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.

Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

(Source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

An American Dream

Historian Sir Niall Ferguson has stated that he was at a party in the early 2000s having been invited by Conrad Black after the success of his book The Pity of War. There were two people present that stood out. The supermodel Elle McPherson and Dr Henry Kissinger. Kissinger approached him and asked him to write this book having already been declined by other famous names. After much consideration Ferguson took the job, but told Kissinger he would not be able to influence the contents. What followed is a fairly impressive, meticulously researched biography that offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on one of the most controversial and consequential figures of 20th-century diplomacy. This first volume (1923-1968) focuses on the formative years of Kissinger’s life, from his childhood in Weimar Germany through his rise as a prominent intellectual and adviser by 1968, just before he became National Security Adviser to President Nixon.

Ferguson’s portrayal of Kissinger challenges the popular image of the man as a cold, calculating realist. Instead, Ferguson presents him as an ‘idealist’ at heart, deeply influenced by philosophical traditions and moral imperatives, particularly those shaped by his experiences as a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi persecution. Kissinger explores how this intellectual foundation, coupled with his academic work on diplomacy and statesmanship, informed Kissinger’s views on the nature of power, peace, and global order.

Most significantly is the depth of archival material and personal papers Ferguson draws upon, much of it never before available. The sheer volume of detail paints a rich picture of Kissinger’s intellectual development, including his education at Harvard and his relationships with leading scholars and policymakers. Ferguson is particularly skilled at tracing the intellectual currents that shaped Kissinger’s thinking, from Kant, Metternich and Bismarck to his own evolving theories on the balance of power and realpolitik. Ferguson as always gives solid arguments, it is especially interesting when he shows how Kissinger’s theories as a Harvard professor cannot be placed into practice, for example with Vietnam and that politicians at times did not consider him to know much about foreign policy.

Kissinger’s central thesis, that Kissinger’s early life and work were driven by a more idealistic vision than is typically credited, may provoke debate among historians, as it contrasts with Kissinger’s later reputation as a practitioner of ruthless realpolitik. Ferguson argues that Kissinger’s idealism didn’t vanish when he entered the corridors of power but rather evolved into a pragmatic approach, constrained by the realities of international politics.

I would suggest that some might find Ferguson’s tone at times too sympathetic or even hagiographic. His admiration for Kissinger is clear, and while Ferguson does not shy away from discussing his subject’s flaws, some readers may feel that the darker aspects of Kissinger’s later career (which will likely be covered in the next volume) could have been addressed with more skepticism here. I also felt that Ferguson got bogged down with context and fine grain detail at times. For me this interrupted the flow and the focus of Kissinger himself got pushed to the background. Nevertheless, Kissinger should peak interest for anyone seeking to understand the intellectual and personal forces that shaped one of the most significant figures of modern diplomacy.

Overall, this first volume stands as a solid scholarly achievement, blending biography, history, and intellectual exploration in a compelling and readable way. It sets the stage for what promises to be a landmark two-part biography of a towering, divisive figure. There has been no announcement for when this will be published, but I’ll be sure to read it when it does come out.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review in the Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/article...

This attentive, magnificently written, and profoundly researched biography of Henry Kissinger before he took office is stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED conference than a life-and-death struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”

Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me, whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered, Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.

Ferguson devotes an entire volume to the period of Kissinger’s life that Walter Isaacson tells in 139 pages out of 767. This volume ends with president-elect Richard Nixon’s appointment of his national security adviser—and a portentous few pages on Kissinger’s appointment of a military adviser, a young Army colonel called Alexander Haig. Freed of the psychological pressure to get to the good bits, whatever horror you fancy in Kissinger’s public career, Ferguson has the space fully to explore every aspect of Kissinger’s past, including the most thorough account of the experience of his Jewish family in gritty Fürth, northern Bavaria, which had in 1813 taken the name Kissinger.

Arriving in New York at the age of 15, Kissinger turns himself into an American adolescent, a soldier, and a married student at Harvard on the GI Bill, where he prepared himself for his career as Harvard professor, defense intellectual, foreign policy adviser to the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, and secretary of state in waiting to the man he thought would be the sixties’ greatest president, Nelson Rockefeller. When Ferguson is through, there is very little left of the picture of Kissinger as a wounded victim of history, or of court Jew—the man whom Isaacson described as a born courtier, “incorrigibly attracted to powerful, charismatic, and wealthy people.”

Ferguson depicts a very different type of midcentury figure. Kissinger enters history as a man of action in the mold of Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and André Malraux, with rifle in his hand. (Had it not been for World War II, Ferguson muses, Kissinger might have become a successful accountant.) History thrust him into the Battle of the Bulge, and as the U.S. Army advanced toward the Rhine, Kissinger found himself—with a rank never higher than staff sergeant—the de facto administrator of just-captured towns in southern Germany just behind the front, where he had to deal on his own with starvation and looting among a sullen, occasionally violent populace.

Soon he became a counterintelligence agent, routing out Wehrmacht cells behind American lines, for which he earned his Bronze Star. Even during basic training, the Army gave him, for the first time, the sense of being fully American, and he felt committed to its mission in Germany not as a Jew, but as someone dedicated to a common purpose. His distraught parents in New York wanted him to come home from that “terrible place,” and he tried to explain why he couldn’t: He and a friend had made a promise to one another the night Hitler died that “we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all previous sacrifices meaningful. We would stay just long enough to do that.”

The sense of commitment to a mission that American arms discovered in action—that we had a responsibility to restore the world—kept Sergeant Kissinger in the Army and propelled him through the first 20 years of his academic career. As student and professor, Kissinger advised not realism but its opposite; not American supremacy but a commitment to our allies’ self-determination; not icy superiority but a sympathetic understanding of the motives of our adversaries, partners, and standers-by. Above all, he believed that a great power had the same obligation to commitment and action that he had felt as a soldier in Germany.

We must find the will to act and to run risks in a situation which permits only a choice among evils. While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Kissinger was the same kind of idealist as John Locke, who argued for British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession because “how fond soever I am of peace I think truth ought to accompany it, which cannot be preserved without Liberty. Nor that without the Balance of Europe kept up.”

Early and late, Kissinger counseled an ethic of action as both strategy and principle. In 1950, he formulated a criticism of Harry Truman’s policy of containment because it yielded all initiative to our adversaries. Containment had become, in effect,

an instrument of Soviet policy. .  .  . We have enabled the USSR to select points of involvement for maximum United States discomfort, leading to a fragmentation of our forces and their committal in strategically unproductive areas. .  .  . [W]e have .  .  . allowed the Soviet General Staff in a strategic sense to deploy our resources and in a tactical sense to lure our armies into endless adventures.

In his first book, published in 1957, he made the same point about Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles’s reliance on mutually assured destruction. Kissinger saw the fruits of these policies in the twin crises of 1956, Suez and the Hungarian uprising. “The petty bureaucrats in Washington,” he wrote to a colleague, “were more outraged with Britain and France than with the Soviets because the British upset their plans more completely. And they were even a little bit irritated with the Hungarians because they forced them into making decisions it would have been simpler never to have had to face. .  .  . And the Hungarians have shown us the insignificance of our moral stature.” To McGeorge Bundy, he wrote a few weeks later: “We may have proved that aggression does not pay”—for France and Britain, not the Soviet Union—“but we have done so to people least likely to disturb the peace. .  .  . I would feel happier about professions of high moral principles if they did not so frequently coincide with a policy of minimum risk.”

With equal consistency and fervor, Kissinger criticized the United States of 1956 on another point: It was not idealist enough, and it seldom bothered to articulate its ideals to the rest of the world. “We, the empiricists, appear to the world as rigid, unimaginative, and even somewhat cynical, while the dogmatic Bolsheviks exhibit flexibility, daring and subtlety,” he lamented in the year of Suez. We promised the world more prosperity, but “unless we address ourselves to the problem of encouraging institutions which protect human dignity the future of freedom is dim indeed.” We justify our actions on the basis “of a communist threat, very rarely on the basis of things we wanted to do because of our intrinsic dynamism.” In an early television interview (1958) he told Mike Wallace: "We should go on the spiritual offensive in the world. We did it ourselves with the Revolution. .  .  . We should say that freedom, if it is liberated, can achieve many of these things." Instead, our leadership was programmatically indifferent to the national aspirations of our allies—and incapable of deciding who our allies should be. Kissinger wanted the Germans to take a bigger role in the Berlin crisis than John F. Kennedy wanted them to do; he admired the fractious Charles de Gaulle and thought he was correct on such matters as maintaining France’s independent nuclear force de frappe. When nominal allies showed that they were incapable of acting in their own interests—as he thought the South Vietnamese were not—Kissinger believed that they should not be regarded as being worth the sacrifice of American resources and lives.

Those who know Niall Ferguson’s newspaper writings will understand that he shares his subject’s deep admiration for America, and the conviction that we cannot shirk our role on the world stage. When Kissinger is frustrated with American leaders and bureaucrats who lack the ability or instinct (or even the desire) to explain and defend their country against the criticism of allies or the malice of enemies—no one understands better than Ferguson.

But it is more than a shared view of foreign policy that makes Ferguson Kissinger’s proper biographer. He has a deep affinity for Kissinger as a human being. Biographer and subject came to America as, more or less, adults; each survived the horrors of being a newcomer at Harvard; both were precociously successful academics whose celebrity beyond the campus earned them the scorn of more conventional and less productive colleagues. Neither contented himself with early success: They continued to work prodigiously hard with an intensity which may have injured the happiness of each man’s family. Ferguson describes with sadness the breakdown of Kissinger’s marriage and in his acknowledgments, thanks his own ex-wife with dignified candor.

The greatest affinity between Ferguson and Kissinger is their devotion to history as a way of understanding the world. Ferguson made his mark with a particularly swinging kind of counterfactual history. His first book, The Pity of War, depicted a world much better off without Britain’s entry into World War I. He greets Kissinger as a fellow counterfactual historian, understanding the profound un-inevitability of the world around him. In his career as a policy intellectual, Kissinger soon learned that America’s leadership, both political and military, preferred to understand the world as lawyers see it, and sometimes cherished its historical ignorance, which extended in the Kennedy administration (so Kissinger thought) from the White House down to the lowliest grunt serving in South Vietnam.

Ferguson makes us admire the subtlety and flexibility of Kissinger’s historical understanding, but it is not always easy to grasp. The polarity of idealism and realism begins to bind and limit Ferguson in much the same way Kissinger thought American reliance on mutually assured destruction and containment gave the initiative to the Soviet Union. Kissinger’s adversaries can seem to determine the battlefield on which Ferguson must fight and define the charges against which Kissinger must be defended. Where Ferguson writes that Kennedy really did seek Kissinger’s advice, and that Kissinger really did want to initiate peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968, you begin to feel that Niall Ferguson is speaking to someone over your shoulder.

After such knowledge as Ferguson provides, what forgiveness? Or what acquaintance? For me, Henry Kissinger’s personality remains elusive. An aspect of Kissinger’s military career, once again, explains more than anything else. Most counterintelligence officers were, like Kissinger, no more than NCOs; their uniforms bore no badge of rank at all, and only generals were entitled to know it. Sergeant Kissinger had the power “to order .  .  . immediate and unquestioned assistance of available troops .  .  . from any officer up to and including a full colonel,” as a fellow counterintelligence officer explained. If an officer asked his rank, Kissinger’s instructions were to reply, “My rank is confidential, but at this moment, I am not outranked.”

Even after Niall Ferguson’s work, this may be the most telling description we have of the real man.

[Keenan Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw Niall Ferguson promote his book at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs in October. His lecture certainly inspired me to buy the book and learn more about the subject, whom up until then I hadn't really known much about. Having no opinion allowed me to go into this book completely unbiased, and have since learned that he is quite a controversial figure given some of his decisions as a foreign policy advisor to almost every president since JFK. However, this Part I is about Kissinger's pre-public life, ending in 1968 when he gets unexpectedly hired onto Nixon's staff, and thus entitled "The Idealist". There is less controversy associated with this portion of Kissinger's life, though I felt Ferguson was quite balanced on the subject, acknowledging his short comings socially and as a husband / father with his incredible intellect and dry sense of humor. It seems to me that Kissinger had the unique ability to be respected by his peers and enemies because of his composure, pragmatism, speech and willingness to say what was not always popular.

Kissinger had an unlikely path to fame as a foreign policy advisor. Born a German Jew, he and his family emigrated to America in 1938, just in time. Meanwhile, his extended relatives and 70% of his childhood community were not so lucky. Kissinger had a hard assimilating to American culture, though he loved and admired its freedom. He was drafted into the infantry after Pearl Harbor and spent much of WWII in Germany given his dialect. It was here that he was one of the first soldiers to discover a concentration camp which deeply effected him for the rest of his life. This section of the book made me MOST identify Kissinger as an Idealist, though Ferguson also points out that this experience also influenced him as a Realist "in the sense of an anti-appeaser, resolved to think inhumanely about power and to defend vital interests violently if necessary."

After WWII, Kissinger benefitted from the GI Bill, allowing returning soldiers to go to college on the government's dime. Had it not been for this, Kissinger (and I'm sure many other notable figures) would have never been able to afford college and would have taken apprenticeship positions. It was at Harvard that his classmates identified him as an intense studier, though less socially outgoing. Kissinger somewhat out of the blue got married during college. It seems that he perhaps never loved his first wife Anne, but it was convenient. She provided a paycheck and a dwelling, and gave Kissinger a socially acceptable excuse to be less "sociable" than his peers.

In totality, I really enjoyed this book, though Part II (which I can only guess will be titled "The Realist" when Ferguson completes it) will be much more detailed on his public life as foreign advisor and the decisions he was a part of. This book was a great context for the eventual Part II because you can begin to understand how he formed his foreign policy beliefs in a "balance of power" to achieve peace, not peace through laws and organizations...a classic statement of realism.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968, is the first volume of Henry Kissinger's biography, written by Niall Ferguson. The biography begins in Furth, Germany, Kissinger's place of birth, and describes the vibrant Jewish community that existed there during the 19th and early 20th century. Kissinger grew up in a time when anti-Semitism in Germany was on the rise, and when Hitler took power in 1933, Kissinger's father, a teacher by trade, was sacked from his job. They tried in vain to find work, but the Kissinger family decided to pack up and leave for the United States, incidentally very soon before the "Night of Broken Glass" and the beginning of violent Jewish repression in Germany.

Kissinger spent his teenage and early years in Furth quietly. He enjoyed soccer, and generally stayed out of politics until his teen years, when he joined a Zionist society advocating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This society was more of a study group, but Kissinger would denounce his Jewish roots as he grew older. His family moved to New York in the 1930's, a place that was itself heavily segregated, and fraught with racial and political tension. Kissinger attended a Jewish college, and eventually graduated to attend Harvard University. As a student, Kissinger began to take an interest in philosophy and history, and specialized in 19th century German history. His studies were interrupted by WWII, when Kissinger joined to return to Germany and fight for the US army. He took the role of an intelligence officer early on, and assisted in the push into Germany from the Netherlands, and eventually ended up working for US occupation forces in the Hesse region. Kissinger returned home to Harvard, and finished his degree, eventually writing an influential (and extremely long) thesis on the philosophy of politics, and attaining his Masters.

Newly minted Dr. Kissinger also married a Jewish girl around this time, although the marriage would be an unhappy one, and would collapse years later. Notorious Kissinger the ladies man was not a figure at this time. Kissinger's political career was also not around yet, although he had contacts in military intelligence and after his doctorate, at Harvard. These relationships would serve him well in the future. It took a while for Doctor Kissinger to get tenured professorship, but he ran a popular class on political philosophy, and specialized in German history. He began to become more involved in the political world as well, but his career took off when he published two influential papers on limited tactical nuclear use and subsequent US policy in regards to its growing Cold War conflict with the USSR. Kissinger was quickly propelled into stardom, and became a household name in the US. He was picked up in 1960 by the Rockefeller campaign, as he began to work with US foreign policy think-tanks, and started to publish foreign policy pieces there. His relationship with Rockefeller was strained, but he stayed loyal for the most part. Even so, when Kennedy was elected, Kissinger was scooped up with the Harvard boys into Kennedy's inner circle, and began to help form policy in the US. Kissinger, although famous, was sidelined by a former Harvard mentor, possibly out of academic rivalry.

Although sidelined, Kissinger was still an influential policy advisor. He caused a scandal in Pakistan when he theorized about the India-Pakistan conflict, being too overconfident about his widely regarded advisory skills, and misreading events surrounding the Kashmir conflict. He did, however, signal a diplomatic coup for the Americans in West Germany, as he made a détente with the sitting Chancellor and talked up US commitment to a European nuclear umbrella. Kissinger missed the Cuba missile crisis, as he was on the out at the time, but his star again began to rise as the 1964 presidential election gained speed. This is when Kissinger began to become the Kissinger the world so loves or hates. He began to become influential again about the Vietnam conflict, and the German issues with the Soviets, and his advisory skills made him a valuable target again for the Rockefellers, for Nixon, and so on. The book ends as he steps into the height of his influence (1968) as a White House advisor, to be continued in part 2.

Ferguson's Kissinger is probably the definitive biography on the man. Everything you will ever need to know about Kissinger, and more, is in this volume, and presumably will continue in part 2. Ferguson makes the claim that Kissinger was not the Machiavellian politician people claim he was, but a Kantian influenced historian/philosopher. Kissinger was indeed idealistic about the need for a more integrated NATO community, and put stock on limited tactical nuclear strikes (something he is infamous for now).

So what of this biography? It is the biography of the rise of a much derived career politician whose name is synonymous with coup d'état's, a disregard for freedoms around the globe, and Machiavellian diplomacy. Kissinger is the man who would eventually contribute to the "loss" of Vietnam, but also a diplomatic volte face in China. Ferguson is a conservative historian, and well placed to write about this politician. Ferguson plays up the ideological angle of Kissinger's ideas, and in some respects this is probably correct over the hysteria that surrounded Kissinger back in the day. He is an adept and able writer, and he has done an excellent job on this biography.

My one small complaint is the tangents the book sometimes takes. Some of them are interesting (the Cuban crisis for example, which is talked of in detail, even though Kissinger was not a part of the decision making process). Some are just odd. Ferguson devotes a whole chapter to the history of Jews in Furth, an entire chapter to segregationist policies in 1930's New York City, and so on. In a 1000 page book, these tangent's often distract from the narrative to the point where it is difficult to remember where Kissinger left off. Ferguson took a grand approach to this biography, and uses Kissinger as a tool to define the age and feeling of paranoia and oppression in the world, and the US, at this point in history. Mostly, he has done an excellent job, and only slips the narrative a couple of times.

All things considered, this was an enjoyable read, and fit the climate of the US 2016 presidential election (which has ended as of writing this only a few hours ago). Ferguson has done a great job chronicling the rise of one of the United States of America's greatest political bureaucrats, and love him or hate him, his policies had a definitive impact on the world as we know it today. His influence on US strategic thought were influential in creating the Cold War US that remains so controversial, with its coups, dictators and nuclear threats. All in all, a good read.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 2 out of 5]

To quote Aesop: "The mountain has laboured and brought forth a mouse." In "Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist", Niall Ferguson proposes and effectively defends his thesis that Henry Kissinger was neither a Machiavellian schemer nor a Bismarckian expansionist as has often been claimed by his critics but rather that he was a rigorous Kantian idealist in that he made the pursuit of peace the goal of his career. While this is probably true, it is not enough to justify the absurd length (882 large pages of dense text) that Ferguson delivers.
In his epilogue, Ferguson explains that he has written the "bildungsroman" of Henry Kissinger. In his lengthy tome Ferguson recounts Kissinger's childhood in Germany, his move to America, career at Harvard and his education in diplomacy working as a consultant for first John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson. As the book concludes Richard Nixon has just named him National Security Advisor a position in which he will be phenomenally successful.
The problem is that Ferguson could have told the tale in 300 pages. Kissinger was unquestionably a fine thinker and a good writer but his publications hardly merit the long-winded analysis that Ferguson makes. Similarly the consulting work that Kissinger performed for the Kennedy and Johnson did not lead to any concrete results other than teaching Kissinger how Washington and the White House functioned. The reader could easily have done with a much shorter account.
To make matters worse, Ferguson's text is larded with fatuous pronouncements. For example he writes on page 212 presumably inspired by the fact that he is a member of the history faculty of Harvard : "Harvard today can claim to be the world's greatest university." He is not referring to the over 100 Nobel prizes in science and medicine that have been won by Harvard professors. Rather he is talking about Harvard's extraordinary network in Washington's bureaucracy and America's two dominant politic parties. While there is clearly a grain of truth in his statement, Ferguson's lack of humility makes the reader cringe.
Ferguson's thoughts on Kissinger's cultural identity are garbled at best. He correctly points out that Kissinger's family members as well-educated Germans belonged to a small minority in New York's Jewish community but fails to explain that Yiddish was the dominant of language of the Jewish minority in the 1930s. Ferguson, however, does a fairly good job of explaining how Kissinger as he immersed himself into the academic and political life of America eventually ceased to be a German refusing in his later life to use his native language in professional settings.
Ferguson has remarkably little to say about Kissinger's views on American politics. He feels that Kissinger who worked for many years as a consultant to Nelson Rockefeller was attracted to Rockefeller's because he was a member of America's de facto aristocracy. As a strong supporter of civil rights, Kissinger felt most at ease with left-wing Republicans. He found pork-barrel politics profoundly distasteful and was reluctant to get involved with Richard Nixon who he felt was disreputable.
I have no serious reservations about Ferguson's conclusions but this first volume of a projected two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger is sloppy and verbose. If he ever manages to get his second volume out, I am not sure that I will read it.

[Mmetevelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's greatest strength was also its weakness. Ferguson is a master of historical detail - weaving discordant threads of things together to paint a coherent picture. Reading this I feel like I learned a ton about the United States in the early and middle stages of the Cold War. The only problem is that I felt like as a biography I lost the subject in the haze. Ferguson vividly paints Kissinger's upbringing, military career during and after the war, and Harvard years. But after this initial formation Kissinger seems lost in a haze of details. Ferguson is clear that he wants to avoid psychologizing or hagiography but it's never clear exactly what Ferguson is trying to do with his subject other than inserting him into a more general history of the period. Still a worthwhile book for combatting common misperceptions of Henry Kissinger. As official biographies go Ferguson would benefit from studying the way the late Martin Gilbert (his fellow Maudlin college professor) placed the subject in the foreground first and foremost even in dealing with daunting amounts of detail. Overall a good if often saturated reading experience.

[Magnus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woaahh! For en bok! Nå vil eg lese mer Kissinger og mer Ferguson. Glede meg te volume 2, om den delen av kissingers liv eg trodde var interessant!

På 1000 sider blir dette fort lengste bok eg noensinne har lest. Hadde ikkje trodd det skulle være del 1 av en biografi om Henry Kissinger. Men det sie vel sitt om både Kissingers liv og om kor fantastisk bra Ferguson skrive.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume looks at Kissinger’s life from birth to age 45, about to begin his first stint of full time government service. This is supposed to be the “official biography” but it looks to me like it is also an effort to revise the revisionist. I believe this will be a controversial biography, some people will claim it is a hagiography others will claim it is not. In my opinion it sits on the borderline but Ferguson is quite critical of Kissinger’s theory of limited nuclear war. Therefore one cannot say Ferguson whitewashed Kissinger and makes Fergusons praise all the more creditable. Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is a senior research fellow at University of Oxford; he also holds fellowships at Harvard and Stanford Universities.

Ferguson had access to every part of Kissinger’s vast archive at the Library of Congress, which is enormous; he also combed through 111 archives all around the world. . Ferguson also had access to Kissinger’s personal papers, diaries and letters. Ferguson spent many hours interviewing Kissinger and many of his peers and family. The author said it took him ten years to do the archive research and interviews. The book is well written and easy to read for a non historian.

Ferguson covers the Kissinger family’s experiences under the Nazi before they immigrated in 1938. He also covers their experiences as Jewish immigrates in New York. The author covers Kissinger’s life in the United States Army during World War II. He tells about Kissinger witnessing the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp. Kissinger saw action at the battle of the bulge and the liberation of a Belgian town. Ferguson tells of his service after V. E. Day as a Nazi hunter with the Counter –Intelligence Corps. The author tells how Kissinger earned the Bronze Star. Fergusson covers his education on the G.I. Bill to Harvard and becoming an associate professor. The author goes into depth about the papers and books Kissinger wrote while at Harvard.
I was interested in the letter Kissinger wrote to his parents explaining why he would no longer adhere to their strict orthodox Jewish faith. I also was interested in the essay Kissinger had written, “The Eternal Jew” when his was age 22 and an Army Sergeant after witnessing the liberation of a Nazis concentration camp. It shows a different view of Kissinger from the political one I have heard so much about.

Malcohm Hillgartner did an excellent job narrating the book. I am looking forward to volume Two. The book is very long at about 1000 pages and 35 hours long.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, at 1,008 pages is now my personal record for the longest non-fiction book I've ever read. Longest ever is Stephen King's IT, just eking out a victory by less than 100 more pages.

Despite how much more there is to know about American foreign policy, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, I feel this book thoroughly clears up a tremendous amount of information on the matter. Henry Kissinger is one of the single most important diplomats in recent American history, and Ferguson presents a thorough examination of his life, philosophies, and choices. The mere fact that Ferguson spent 10 years researching and writing this book shows as clear a picture of Kissinger first 45 years as has ever been published.

Well balanced and researched throughout. Challenging and enlightening. I recommend this to anyone looking for a challenge.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely detailed, well written

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excepting perhaps the current POTUS, no recent statesman can provoke a bar fight faster than Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He supposedly represented the apotheosis of realpolitik in American foreign affairs, but Niall Ferguson's superb biography of Kissinger's formative years in the US Army and as an academic at Harvard emphasizes his devotion to the principles of freedom and representative government. I eagerly look forward to his future volume.

[Daniella]

The saga is over...Kissinger killed his dog

[Dan Graser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 900 page tome is the first in a two part profile of the quintessential American foreign-policy maker, for better or worse. With characteristic wit and erudition, Niall Ferguson gives a hugely detailed portrait of the development of Henry Kissinger's intellect from fleeing Nazi Germany, service in the second World War, his education (and discomfort) and ironic rejection of the college atmosphere, and his first forays into political life with Nelson Rockefeller, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. I won't say the 900 pages fly by, there is almost too much information to be digested, but I can say you will be left with a much different and much clearer picture of the young Kissinger, before the world got to know him as Nixon's National Security Advisor. That is a much more public tale and one which will have to wait for the next volume....This one is highly recommended, but realize you're in it for the long haul!

[Jay Rain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating - 9.5

Impressive feat that is 2/3 fascination & 1/3 chore (my lack of knowledge about Kissinger vs the sheer size of this volume of work); So much respect for Ferguson & team for putting together this epic read

More my own mileage, however was far more immersed in the Vietnam content than the earlier years, specifically the inefficiencies that lead to the US defeat; A balanced view of triumphs & mistakes

[Darya Silman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative dive into the policy making behind the Cold War. Though there are seen traces of admiration for the such controversial figure as Henry Kissinger, the books goes into little details that help to form reader's own opinions. I picked up some names and books I want to read further.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did you know that Henry Kissinger is still alive? I didn’t, until I looked it up. (He’s ninety-seven years old.) Is he forgotten? I suspect so, by most people. Was he important to American history? I hate to break it to the Baby Boomers, but no, he wasn’t. He was important to them in their youth, as a condensed symbol of their hatred of decent America, and he seemed important to most at that time, but as with so many men who seem crucial in the moment, history will not judge Kissinger as good or bad, just irrelevant. Nonetheless, Niall Ferguson, a great admirer of Kissinger (as is evident from some of his other books), offers his wide readership this massive biography. But I can’t recommend it except to those with a particular interest in the person or the time.

This is the first of two projected volumes, although there is no indication the second is coming out anytime soon, and this was published in 2015. It is nearly a thousand pages, and it weighs nearly four pounds. It is blurbed by a Who’s Who of elite has-beens: James Baker, Condoleezza Rice, John Lewis Gaddis. Its writing is clear and precise. Yet it is strangely unsatisfying. It’s so unsatisfying, it took me more than two years to read, because I kept finding excuses to not return to it.

I wondered why I found it unsatisfying. I think, upon reflection, it’s not only that the reader suspects that Kissinger isn’t all that important. It’s that the book is unidimensional. It is all foreign policy, all the time, in endless detail. You will find little here about Kissinger’s personal life as an adult, except in passing, or for that matter anyone else’s personal life, except as it bears on foreign policy. And, although I certainly admit this is not true for everyone, I find discussion about American foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s boring. Books on it tend to be too detailed—probably because so much information is available that it all gets thrown in, without adequate parsing. And though those details mattered very much to those who lived through them, they matter very little to us today, unless we have some special interest in the period. We want to know about the broader strokes of history, not endless specifics about some unimportant meeting among ambassadors.

But you have to respect Ferguson for putting in the work. He’s a busy guy; he’s a public intellectual. Now, that term is today debased—Ibram X. Kendi is a public intellectual, too; my dog would be as well, if he could bark “I’m anti-racist!” and “I hate white people!” I’ve read every one of Ferguson’s books, and I feel a bit sorry for him, because he sails an unstable path, between the Scylla of cancellation and the Charybdis of irrelevancy. He’s conservative, or what passes for that among our elites, but a member of, and dependent on, our loathsome ruling class of “global citizens.” He always risks being cancelled, because he’s based in reality. As his class departs more and more in its thoughts and habits from reality, such men of the in-between twilight have less and less room for maneuver.

What results, for example, is that Ferguson must castigate Donald Trump in ludicrous, deceitful terms, as in a recent Bloomberg piece, either because that’s what he really thinks, meaning he is not a conservative in any meaningful sense, or because he has to pretend that’s what he thinks, to prevent being cancelled. It’s embarrassing to watch either way. He actually, in print, with his name attached, posits an imaginary center ground, and then tells us it’s occupied by—Joe Biden. Ferguson, sadly, risks becoming a joke. His next book, due out in May, is titled Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. We’ll see if he takes an honest approach. None of this matters, though, for his biography of Kissinger, since talking about foreign policy of the past is reasonably safe political ground, and anyway 2015 was an eternity ago in modern political terms.

Kissinger is not precisely an “authorized biography,” but Ferguson was given access to all of Kissinger’s papers, and granted multiple interviews with Kissinger himself. “Not only has this book been written with Henry Kissinger’s cooperation; it was written at his suggestion.” Ferguson’s judgment of Kissinger is highly positive, not really surprising, for Kissinger is precisely the kind of man Ferguson admires, because he sees himself in the mirror—someone who was honored in the councils of the powerful, and was himself extremely knowledgeable about history, or at least a slice of history. And when a man’s life is the explication and execution of grand strategy, it is always easy to find an event that could have gone better, so Ferguson properly avoids criticism on that basis. Nor does he find the faults in him the Baby Boomers do. Any faults he ascribes to Kissinger are minor and the result of circumstance.

Why is Kissinger an object of hate to the Boomers? Some of it is his role in the Vietnam War, connected to his service of the Devil, Richard Nixon, which causes them to babble about war crimes and similar stupidity, but more broadly, it is a combination of Kissinger’s realism and what flowed from that, anti-Communism. We should not forget, and Ferguson reminds us, that moral equivalence was the bedrock principle of the American Left during the entire Cold War. When in doubt, Communism was to be preferred, though usually not openly. Kissinger was not having any of that. He was, to be sure, an inconstant anti-Communist, but the Boomers run on emotion, not logic. As the Boomers die off, though, interest in Kissinger is sure to wane, until he’s just a footnote, like some functionary who worked for Metternich whom nobody but specialists remember.

Pulling back the lens, nothing comes out more in these pages than that the America of 2021, as represented by its ruling class, is not a serious society. Every single man (there are no women of any relevance here) in the period 1945 to 1968, the pertinent period for this book, was a paragon of knowledge, about history and human nature, compared to the very best of those in power, or connected to power, today. As a matter of course, they referred to history and engaged in complex, sophisticated analyses. Many, perhaps most, had served their country in war. Few were ideologues (the Communists and quasi-Communists very prominent under Franklin Roosevelt were mostly gone); they were intent on doing the best they could for the country, and they brought talent and education to bear. Sure, they were often enough wrong, and they did things we today, using hindsight, view as unwise, such as constantly threatening global thermonuclear war. But they were serious men, who would have viewed today’s clownish, uneducated, ideological elite with total contempt, combined with astonishment that such people could actually be the ruling class.

But let’s talk about the subject of the book. Kissinger was born in 1923, in Fürth, in Bavaria. He has disclaimed any importance of his childhood to his life, and in Ferguson’s telling, Fürth was a dull, provincial backwater, although certainly the 1920s were years of turmoil even there. Fürth had a large Jewish community, split between Reform and Orthodox; the Kissingers were Orthodox. As with most German Jews, the Kissingers were largely assimilated, committed to the Reich. His father, Louis, did not fight in World War I, but several uncles and cousins did. Louis worked as civil servant, a high school teacher, so the economic turmoil of the 1920s hit the family hard.

Bavaria was not the center of National Socialist support, but the Jews of Fürth were clear that things were not on the right track. When Hitler came to power, overt acts targeting Jews increased there, as everywhere in Germany. Louis Kissinger was fired in 1933, and started teaching outside the state educational system to earn his living. In 1938 the family chose to emigrate; they were able to go to America because Kissinger’s mother’s cousin lived in America and was able to promise to support the Kissingers if they arrived, a requirement for immigrants then (which should be reinstated, but that’s another story). The family left right before Kristallnacht. By the war’s end, only forty Jews were left in Fürth; around five hundred of the two thousand who lived in Fürth in 1933 were killed, while the rest emigrated.

Ferguson does an outstanding job of describing the New York of the 1930s, Jewish and otherwise. Here, at least, foreign policy detail does not overwhelm the book. The young Kissinger worked hard, both at studying and at earning money for the family, among other things working in a brush factory. Drafted into the Army in 1943 after his nineteenth birthday, Kissinger became a United States citizen after basic training, then was sent to study engineering as part of an Army training program for high-IQ soldiers. The program was shut abruptly, however, and Kissinger went for further training as a grunt of the 84th Infantry Division, in 1944. There he met Fritz Kraemer, whom both Ferguson and his subject rate as a huge influence on Kissinger. Kraemer was also German, an elitist conservative fifteen years older than Kissinger, and an expert in international law, who was assigned to teach young draftees what they needed to know about Germany. The story goes that Kraemer recognized Kissinger’s genius, and became a friend and mentor to him. Ferguson emphasizes Kraemer’s influence a great deal, calling him “Mephistopheles to Kissinger’s Faust”; I don’t know enough about Kissinger to say if this is a new angle, or standard.

In November 1944 Kissinger shipped out to England. He served in the waning days of the war, on the Siegfried Line, and in the Battle of the Bulge—not on the front lines, but at divisional headquarters, as “special agent” in the “Counter-Intelligence Corps,” the CIC. Mostly this meant paperwork and evaluating captured German soldiers, as well as German civilians, as to their usefulness and threat potential. The 84th liberated the Ahlem concentration camp, near Hanover, giving Kissinger first-hand exposure to the Holocaust. Kissinger remained in Germany after fighting ended. Until 1946 he in essence helped to administer the Allies’ denazification program, not just the paper aspects, but using informers to smoke out supposedly important Nazis. Then he took a civilian teaching position at an Army intelligence school in Bavaria, and came back to the States in June 1947.

Kissinger proceeded to Harvard (in part on the strength of a recommendation from Kraemer, now working in government); he graduated in 1950. In the late 1940s, Harvard’s infrastructure was shambolic and the campus overcrowded, but the quality of its education was arguably at its peak. Many important men for the coming decades were graduating at this time, and Ferguson again does a good job of conveying the flavor of the times—unbridled optimism and pride in America, often undercut with a Messiah complex, along with the fears of the early Cold War. Kissinger’s talent was recognized by the important and powerful, so although he made few fast friends his own age, he made the right connections with professors, and thus the beginnings of connections to the East Coast elite that directed the course of America.

In part under the influence of William Yandell Elliott, Kissinger was drawn to work in government. Ferguson spends inordinate time on Kissinger’s approach to, and philosophy of, history, for which “realism” is an oversimplification, though “idealist” is also a tough sell. Most of all, he was anti-utopian, assuming that even if, for any given period of time, peace might be achieved, it could never be permanent. Yet, as I say, the reader does not really get a sense for Kissinger as a person. Maybe, however, that’s because there is not much there; maybe Kissinger was just an Analytical Engine. One doesn’t get the sense that Kissinger lacked social skills, quite the contrary (he was always fairly successful with women), but that what mattered to him was the analysis of any given matter. The Cold War provided the perfect field for a man such as this.

He stayed at Harvard, getting a Ph.D. in 1954, but also running the International Seminar and ostentatiously starting a quarterly magazine, Confluence. It was in that magazine (which does not seem to be available online; it was only published three times) that Ernst Jünger published an article that was later developed into the book The Forest Passage, an article that proved highly controversial, both for its author and for Jünger’s unique take on the challenges facing the modern West. Even more controversially, Kissinger also published an article by German rightist Ernst von Salomon, discussing (apparently) German resistance to Hitler. (Ferguson incorrectly identifies Salomon as a “convicted murderer”; he was in fact nothing of the sort, rather convicted of being a mere accessory to the murder of Walther Rathenau, for providing an automobile to the murderers.) As a result, Kissinger was attacked, among others, by members of the Ford Foundation, which was funding him, and defended himself by pointing out that understanding men like Salomon was important. One suspects, though, that an ambitious man such as Kissinger thought any such publicity was good publicity.

Kissinger involved himself in various other groups and efforts. The reader notes that he always thought for the long term, beyond the struggles of the day, though he had very much to say about those (his first book was Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy). In 1951, for example, he presumed that America would triumph over the Soviet Union, but worried that “within a generation [we may] find ourselves in a world in which we must supply our challenges from within ourselves. This is a real issue for long-range thinking, and its solution requires a profound doctrine.” Very true, though it’s obvious now we’ve failed to meet the challenge.

In 1955 he began to enter the public eye . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[James Pasternak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most common question author and historian Niall Ferguson gets asked is “When will volume II of “Kissinger” come out? After all it’s been 8 years since the definitive first volume arrived and now with Kissinger dead at 100 there’s not a lot more to talk about. Kissinger was perhaps the most talked about thinker and non elected government official of his time. As national security advisor and Secretary of State he controlled American foreign relations and world affairs like none other. Meticulously researched, beautifully written and chuck full of intrigue Kissinger is an adventure in RealPolitik. The irony of course is that this volume ends before the real mayhem begins such as wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, the bombing of Cambodia, a coup in Chile and the invasion of Cypress by Turkey. For Henry the special of the day was Chile con carnage. Find a world hot spot and a mass casualty event and Henry was never far away. Academia was just the wrong pace for this just guy who was more interested in moving global chess pieces with military might. Stop the debate let’s get on with the war. But fleeing Germany as a kid and then fighting Nazis on the American side, musings about limited nuclear war made Kissinger the talk of the town. The end game made one wonder whether the price of stability and strategic interests really outweighed high casualty figures. But most hung on every word listening to what the old man in the cave had to say. And while he didn’t always get it right, his realism hit home with most : he may have mercury running through his veins but maybe he still has a point. Parodied on Saturday Night Live, a regular on red carpets and outlasting presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger’s wars might be long over but his shadow remains. And with two wars now raging pundits and strategists must be quietly asking: what would Henry do?

[Marc Sabatier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular biography. Great balancing of Kissinger’s private life and upbringing, career and the sufficient amount of grand historical context which is need to follow his trajectory.

Further, Ferguson lays out - to the best of my knowledge - a balanced presentation of various accounts of kissinger, and clearly states when he gives his thoughts on the merits of Kissinger. Recommended.

[Paul C. Stalder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece of modern history displaying the beginning years the controversial Publix figure. And he was not that controversial during these years. An intellectual, and idealist, and a political critic, the young Kissinger seems a far cry from the demonized figure he would later become. And Ferguson does an unmatched job of synthesising not just Kissinger, but the world around him. Part of what makes this book so long is its depth. Ferguson seems uncomfortable with letting the reader rely on external knowledge. Accordingly, and only as one example, it is not enough to mention the Vietnam War, but Ferguson has to plumb into its origins, into the politics of Vietnam, and provide a rich understanding of the event. This led me to assert, to the many who asked how the massive tome splayed on my lap was, that it felt more like a history surrounding Kissinger, than a biography about Kissinger. The style did make the work fulsome, yet it did feel unwieldy at points. Regardless, if you have an interest in US political history of this era, take the time to read this book.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty epic book, and worth it for anybody trying to understand American foreign policy and the development of foreign policy, as well as anybody fascinated with the enigma of Kissinger. The epilogue is especially excellent, as a kind of synthesis of the many hundreds of pages that it follows. I like some of the insights from Kissinger's scholarship and thought, especially sentiments like (to paraphrase) "insistence on absolutes is a recipe for inaction."

[Maru Kun]

Is this some kind of joke?

[Duncan McKinnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covers a lot, right up until things get interesting. I think a lot of people would have preferred if more of the Vietnam era and Nixon's presidency were included.

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with all excellent biographies, this first of two volumes provides much insight into a person, their development, motivations, influences, and actions, while also providing important context through history, events of the period, and the actions of other people at the time.
Ferguson writes with considerable objectivity though there are moments when his personal regard for Kissinger can lead him into lengthy and, to me, irrelevant justifications. He’s a great writer whose only sin in my eyes is a need to lump together political activists and liberal thinkers with petty unflattering labels. Thus his own conservatism is blatantly on stage. Lol.
I’ve learned a great deal about this period in which I was directly involved as a “dirty hippie” and as I now begin my journey into what I must admit is old age, I find to no surprise that everything about JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Kissinger is much more nuanced than I would have allowed at the time. Certainty is for youth.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Humanizing and Overdue Reassessment

One of the tremendous difficulties of the biographer’s task insofar as contemporary individuals is concerned is finding the distance to conduct a neutral assessment. Niall Ferguson manages to do just that in the first volume of his biography of Kissinger, deconstructing the images of Kissinger as a Cold War caricature, Kissinger as a hate figure of the New Left, and Kissinger as a Bismarckian cynic and instead looking at the formation and core of the man himself and how he came to be in power. I’ll be looking forward to the eventual second volume of this work.

[Mr. Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An obviously rosy depiction of Kissinger that glosses over a lot (and conveniently stops right before the worst parts of his life, with no Volume 2 in sight..). But still a good meditation on idealism vs realism, theory vs action, agency vs determinism. Explores the tension that arises from the idea that knowing history deeply helps you understand the present, but shaping the future requires “flying blind.”

[Frederik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kissinger. Hvad skal man dog sige om ham? Geni eller skurk? Superdiplomat eller kynisk, menneskeforagtende Machiavellist? Efter dette første bind af Niall Ferguson (fra 1923-1968) er jeg stadig i tvivl, og også fordi hans mest betydelige handlinger/ugerninger under Vietnamkrigen først bliver behandlet i det næste ( og sidste) bind, som endnu ikke er udgivet. Dog kan der ikke være tvivl om hans ubestridelige intellekt, og et utroligt "wunderkind" med en ikke helt ueffen selvironi. Samlet set er biografien dog lidt af en skuffelse, især fordi man får opremset hans involvering i diverse amerikanske regeringers udenrigspolitiske gøren og laden under især første del af Vietnamkrigen, men uden at man lærer personen Kissinger meget bedre at kende. Den minder derfor - desværre - mere om Robert Dalleks historisk grundige, men upersonlige tilgang til biografi-formen, end Robert Caros mesterlige og nærmest krimi-spændende behandling af Robert Moses og LBJ. Der er derfor en lidt bitter eftersmag af en spildt mulighed for at kunne have skabe noget stort.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but insightful and very enjoyable. Kissinger is an important figure in modern diplomacy and Ferguson's review of his early years is fascinating. I actually laughed out aloud several times during reading this tome.

[Bruce Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson's Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist represents the first volume of an authorized biography that fundamentally challenges conventional understanding of Henry Kissinger. Drawing on unprecedented access to over 145 boxes of previously unavailable documents—8,000 of which Ferguson digitized for his research—this massive work (which is Volume 1 only) spans six books and 22 chapters plus an epilogue. Ferguson's central thesis, signaled in the subtitle, positions Kissinger not as the amoral realpolitiker of popular imagination but as a "Kantian idealist" whose philosophical framework shaped his approach to statecraft.

Methodology and Access

Ferguson's relationship with his subject deserves scrutiny. Initially refusing Kissinger's request to become his biographer, Ferguson reconsidered only after learning of newly discovered archival materials. He claims complete editorial freedom, citing his 2004 contract stipulating that "the author shall have full editorial control over the final manuscript and that Kissinger shall have no right to vet the manner or prevent the publication of any of the finished manuscript." Ferguson positions himself as Kissinger's Boswell, applying standards derived from R.G. Collingwood: that “all history is the history of thought, that historical knowledge requires reenactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying, Historical knowledge is the reenactment f a past thought incapsulated in a context of present thoughts…."

This methodology produces both insights and limitations. Ferguson's empathetic reconstruction of Kissinger's intellectual development yields rich analysis of his subject's philosophical formation. Yet the authorized nature of the project raises questions about critical distance, particularly given Ferguson's observation that "the most bitter denunciations of Kissinger came after the Soviet threat had, as if by magic, disappeared"—a framing that suggests retrospective criticism lacks legitimacy.

The Fürth Context and Early Formation

Ferguson devotes 75 pages to Kissinger's birthplace of Fürth, despite Kissinger's own dismissal of it as "a matter of indifference to me." This seemingly excessive attention actually serves Ferguson's larger argument about the intellectual and cultural context that shaped Kissinger's worldview. The detailed treatment of Weimar Germany, its collapse, and the rise of Nazism establishes the existential stakes that would inform Kissinger's later rejection of naive idealism in foreign policy. Indeed, the entire work is the story of Kissinger prior to commencing work for Nixon, enlightened by a large amount of cultural, political, and non-Kissinger historical material.

Kissinger's wartime service receives thorough treatment, including his participation in the Army Specialized Training Program for bright enlisted men (eliminated in February 1944) and his Bronze Star for counterintelligence work. Ferguson notes the crucial mentorship of Fritz Kraemer, an older German émigré who became Kissinger's first intellectual guide. Both men had "just barely escaped from the anti-Jewish mass vaccinations of Hitler's Germany," creating a bond forged in shared existential awareness.

Ferguson's observations, for example, that American soldiers averaged two inches taller than British redcoats in the Revolution and his noting that three-quarters of Allied soldiers killed in World War II died from artillery, mortars, grenades, or bombs rather than small arms fire demonstrate his attention to concrete detail. His willingness to acknowledge uncomfortable facts—that "it seems likely that Soviet soldiers raped over 2 million German women"—suggests a commitment to historical accuracy over sanitized narrative.

Harvard Years: Intellectual Development

Kissinger's path to Harvard came through rejection—Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Penn, and Princeton all turned him down. Harvard admitted him as a sophomore, crediting his prewar accountancy studies at City College. He graduated in the class of 1950 and remained at Harvard for the next 21 years.

The portrait that emerges is of relentless ambition paired with genuine intellectual seriousness. Kissinger "worked harder, studied more, read until one or two AM" with "tremendous driving discipline." His senior thesis ran 388 pages, the longest in Harvard's history and the reason for the current 140-page limit. Ferguson describes it as "an exercise in academic exhibitionism." Entitled "The Meaning of History," it brings together Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant, strange bedfellows indeed.

Ferguson chronicles Kissinger's persistent difficulties with Harvard's intellectual culture and bureaucratic politics. Kissinger complained about the university's "increasingly narrow and sterile atmosphere" and "debilitating spirit of atomism" where "no one cares about anyone else's work and even less about his human development." The observation that aspiring professors were "bound to become slavish conformists" resonates through Kissinger's later critique of government bureaucracy.

A 1972 conversation with Nixon captures Kissinger's disillusionment: "Academic life is depressing... you're spending your life with a group of teenagers...and you are entirely dependent on the personal recommendation of some egomaniac."

Nuclear Strategy and Limited War

Ferguson devotes substantial attention to Kissinger's contributions to nuclear strategy, particularly his advocacy for tactical nuclear weapons and "flexible response" as alternatives to Eisenhower's doctrine of massive retaliation. Kissinger's book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy argued that "where war is considered tantamount to national suicide, surrender may appear the lesser of two evils."

This work established Kissinger as a serious strategic thinker while revealing his philosophical commitments. Ferguson emphasizes Kissinger's Kantian conviction that choosing between lesser and greater evils was "inherently a moral act." Kissinger criticized Americans for their "naïve belief that foreign policy could be conducted as a science when it was in fact the art of weighing probabilities."

Critique of bureaucracy emerges as a persistent theme. Kissinger observed that the U.S. government "consists of sovereign departments who engage in interdepartmental and interservice haggling." SIOP-62, the first integrated strategic plan, "specified 2,500 targets" calling for "650 Desired Ground Zeros to be hit by 1,400 weapons with a total yield of 2,100 megatons." Ferguson notes it "seemed as if the three armed services had no more sophisticated strategy than to unload as many as possible of their weapons on the Soviet Union."

The Berlin Crisis and Cold War Realities

Ferguson's treatment of Cold War crises demonstrates how extensively this biography transcends conventional biographical bounds to become a historical, cultural and political history of the times. The Berlin crisis of 1961 receives detailed analysis, including the revelation that U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson "all but spelled it out to Khrushchev that some form of restriction on the outflow from East Germany would be acceptable to the United States." The result was the Berlin Wall. Kennedy's private response, "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war", contrasted with public outrage. The tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie was defused when Robert Kennedy told a Soviet intermediary that if Russian tanks withdrew, American tanks would follow within 20 minutes. They did, though it took 30 minutes.

Throughout, Ferguson emphasizes Kissinger's conviction that "the Cold War was not the result of a misunderstanding between our leaders and those of the Soviet Union. It was the result of Soviet policies: suppression of freedom in Eastern Europe, refusal to compromise on arms control, pressure on all peripheral areas, and the unprovoked threat to Berlin." This represented realism grounded in historical understanding rather than naive faith in negotiation.

Vietnam: Lessons in Futility

The Vietnam sections reveal Kissinger as peripheral observer rather than decision-maker—a frustrating position for someone who believed he understood the war's fundamental problems. Ferguson notes that in 1964 only ten countries outside sub-Saharan Africa were poorer than Vietnam in per capita GDP. McNamara's retrospective list of six policy failures provides a damning indictment from one intimately involved: failure to consult allies, failure to determine how conventional forces could overcome guerrillas, failure at state-building, failure to understand limits of military force, failure to appreciate the complex relationship between force and political objectives, and failure of the American decision-making process itself.

Following his first visit to Vietnam, Kissinger's firsthand observations were scathing. He noted "the army has degenerated. They have produced a group of experts in giving briefings whose major interest is to overpower you with floods of meaningless statistics." He observed after his second trip there, "there was simply no collective memory; new people start with great enthusiasm but little sophistication. By the time they learn their job it's time for them to leave."

The attempts at commencing negotiations with the North Vietnamese revealed what Ferguson calls a "Catch-22: negotiations were necessary because the South Vietnamese government was so weak, but they also could not happen because the South Vietnamese government was so weak." Kissinger's participation in efforts like Operation Marigold taught him that Hanoi "never had any intention of beginning negotiations," though the experience proved valuable for understanding diplomatic process.

Ferguson quotes Kissinger at a meeting with President Johnson, where Kissinger argued "I cannot believe that the security of the United States will be endangered if for a little while we do not bomb within ten miles of the capital of a fifth-rate agricultural power." Johnson replied: "OK, we will do it the professor's way. But if it doesn't work, I will personally cut your balls off."

Bureaucracy and the "Problem of Conjecture"

A consistent theme throughout Ferguson's narrative is Kissinger's critique of bureaucratic decision-making. Arthur Schlesinger described the executive bureaucracy as having "an infinite capacity to dilute, delay, obstruct, resist, and sabotage presidential purposes." Kissinger observed "government by improvisation" and complained that "bureaucracy makes a deliberate effort to reduce the relevant elements of a problem to a standard of average performance."

The deeper issue was what Kissinger called the "problem of conjecture." Policymakers faced an impossible dilemma: "If he acts early, he cannot know whether it is necessary. If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky. It is a terrible dilemma." Kissinger insisted "every statesman must choose at some point between whether he wishes certainty or whether he wishes to rely on his assessment of the situation."

This philosophical framework distinguished Kissinger from the "systems analysis" approach favored by McNamara's "whiz kids," who created "the illusion that progress toward victory could be measured as accurately as the output of vehicles from a General Motors plant." Kissinger believed "policy requires the ability to project beyond the known" and criticized the tendency to operate "only on the basis of what is negotiable" rather than "what is desirable."

Access and Influence

Ferguson's account of Kissinger's exclusion from the Kennedy administration provides lessons about Washington power dynamics. Despite his expertise and Rockefeller connections, Kissinger found himself marginalized. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's National Security Advisor, kept Kissinger at arm's length, denying him access to Kennedy despite Kennedy’s wish to have him involved. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kissinger was "so completely out of the loop" that "the only crisis he had to deal with was a crisis of secretarial staffing in Nelson Rockefeller's research department."
The experience taught Kissinger that "access to the president was not the most important thing in American politics. It was the only thing, and that without it even the best and brightest of Harvard whiz kids were doomed to impotence." This lesson would shape his approach when he finally achieved power under Nixon.

Cultural and Intellectual History

Ferguson's biography extends well beyond Kissinger to encompass broader cultural and political developments. He traces the evolution of American strategic thought, NATO politics (particularly de Gaulle's desire for a "tripolar world"), the Sino-Soviet split, and domestic political realignments. The observation that Eisenhower's original draft warning against the "military-industrial complex" actually read "military-industrial-congressional complex" reveals a great deal, including the value of detailed research in relevant historical documents.

Ferguson includes cultural touchstones that locate Kissinger within his times: Woody Allen's joke that the New York Times was "a New York, Jewish, communist, left-wing newspaper, and that's just the sports section"; Kennedy's "extraordinary sexual antics" enabled by a compliant press; and the transformation of the Republican Party between 1964, when Goldwater's declaration that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" to 1968 when Nixon took over marked a notable shift.

Kissinger's own bon mots appear throughout: "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy." When thanked by a stranger for "saving the world," Kissinger replied without missing a beat: "You're welcome."

Critical Assessment

Ferguson's thesis that Kissinger was fundamentally an idealist rather than a cynic rests on philosophical analysis of Kissinger's early writings and their Kantian foundations. The argument is more convincing regarding intellectual influences than ultimate worldview. Kissinger may have believed choosing between evils was a moral act, but this hardly makes him Wilson in a different guise. Ferguson himself acknowledges Kissinger "was a Kantian idealist, not a Wilsonian idealist" and "was never a Machiavellian"—distinctions that may be too subtle for the subtitle's provocative claim that Kissinger was in fact an “idealist.”

Ferguson's research is undeniably impressive. The archival work, attention to context, and willingness to present Kissinger's worldview on its own terms provide valuable correctives to otherwise current caricatures. The portrait of a young man shaped by near-extermination, educated in history and philosophy, frustrated by bureaucratic sclerosis, and convinced that moral choice exists even in tragic circumstances challenges simplistic denunciations.

Ferguson's prose occasionally suffers from excessive detail—do we need quite so much about Fürth or Harvard's institutional politics? Yet the cumulative effect creates texture and context that illuminate Kissinger's intellectual development. The observation that Kissinger complained more than 50 years ago about "the smug, patronizing, condescending attitude with which too many of my colleagues [at Harvard] (and probably I as well) have treated those less sophisticated" resonates powerfully today.

Volume 1 ends as Kissinger joins Nixon's administration, having spent years as an outsider critiquing policies he believed fundamentally flawed. Nixon told him after the election that "he had very little confidence in the State Department and was determined to run foreign policy from the White House," music to Kissinger's ears after years of bureaucratic frustration.

Kissinger: 1923-1968 succeeds as intellectual biography and historical synthesis while raising questions about the authorized biography genre. Ferguson demonstrates that Kissinger's worldview emerged from serious philosophical engagement rather than amoral cynicism, even if readers may question whether this makes him an "idealist." The book's value lies less in resolving debates about Kissinger's ultimate character than in providing the historical and intellectual context necessary for informed judgment. As the first volume of a projected multi-volume work, it establishes foundations for understanding one of the twentieth century's most consequential and controversial figures—on that limited but important ambition, Ferguson delivers. It is believed that Volume 2 will be ready only in 2027. I, for one, look forward to it.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough and thoughtful. You can't help suspecting that Ferguson finds many occasions for personal reflection in his detailed and sometimes unnecessarily longwinded account of Kissinger's life and work prior to his 1968 appointment as Nixon's National Security Advisor.

Still Ferguson convincingly calls out and challenges a number of less well documented myths about Kissinger and most importantly manages to paint a convincingly complete picture of the man, his thoughts and actions.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Political biography of 20th century statesman

I might have added qualifying modifiers to that review title,because for the decade of the 1970s Henry Kissinger was the man most responsible for American foreign policy when huge global issues hung in the balance: the Vietnam War, nuclear proliferation and deterrence, the Cold War, and the projection of American military power around the world. Next to the US Presidents he served and the leaders of the Soviet and Chinese governments, he may have been the most important statesman of those years. Niall Ferguson, in volume 1 of a planned two-volume set, covers the events leading up to Kissinger's appointment by newly elected President Richard Nixon to lead his foreign policy team.

This is a large accomplishment in many ways, first literally: 880 pages of text plus another 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. As a historian, Ferguson is not content to just provide the biographical background of the man, but brings in contextual history to play e him in his world. In fact, one weakness of the book is that, after Ferguson has brought him through the formative years in Hitler's Germany and then his immigration to the US with his parents as a young teen, we learn very little of Kissinger's private life. His divorce in the 1950s from his first wife and two young children amid accusations of infidelity is dismissed in a very few paragraphs which Ferguson relates in conjunction with and devotes as many words to as John F. Kennedy's well-known extramarital exploits.

But it is also a large accomplishment because while Kissinger would later reach that pinnacle of importance, his early years and the formation of his thoughts and plans are vital and to this point not well understood, according to Ferguson. Kissinger has been vilified by some mostly on the left) for his cynical manipulation of global events and by others (mostly on the right) for his supposed membership in global conspiracies. Even though I lived through and reached voting age during the decade of the 1970s, I had forgotten or never knew the depth of dislike for Kissinger on both extremes of the American political spectrum. Ferguson has taken on the task of examining all of Kissinger's published and private archives (Ferguson is at pains to say that while he was given exclusive access by Kissinger, both signed a contract giving Kissinger no review rights and Ferguson full authority on the content) to show how such accusations are false. In fact, as hinted in the subtitle, Ferguson identifies Kissinger as an Idealist, as opposed to the cynical Realist of his attackers. Given Ferguson's access to private archives, the thoroughness of his arguments, and his well-established reputation as a historian (for example, see my reviews of his books on the decline of empires

Colossus: The Rise and fall of The American Empire
Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century conflict and the descent of the West

), it is likely that this and its companion volume will be the accepted biography of Kissinger for the next generation or more.

As a Jew in Germany during the rise of Hitler, Kissinger was exposed to anti-semitism before his parents escaped with Henry and his brother to the US just before that route was closed off and most of those remaining (including many of Kissinger's extended family) died or suffered violently in the concentration camps. While Kissinger later claimed that he did not see himself first as a victim, Ferguson does show how that experience formed Kissinger's interest in history, politics, and philosophy as a bright student in his New York City high school and then college before he was drafted for service in World War II. His military service further shaped him, first in a crash course in college level history and military theory and then assignment to 1945 Europe to utilize his bilingual abilities to help establish occupation government and identify former Nazi party members for exclusion from positions of authority and arrest. Somewhat surprisingly, Kissinger enjoyed his years of service, getting high marks from his peers and superior officers, and he remained in the Reserve for a few years after returning to the US and going to Harvard on the GI Bill.

It was here that Kissinger's career as writer, professor and statesman took off. He was a forceful writer, and, based on his military experience, not afraid to take on organizational challenges like organizing a graduate level program for international studies, where he was exposed to existing authorities in the field and started to build his own reputation. By the time he obtained his PhD in 1954 (his thesis, later published, on early 19th century European diplomacy) he was already noted as an academic thought leader in international relations. It was a heady time to be at Harvard and engaged in fields like this as the era of the "think tank" was just beginning; the "best and brightest" (as David Halberstom's book title called them), including Kissinger, joined in government sponsored and funded academic forums to bring the latest theories in technology, science, management, and international relations in the practical world of the halls of government. While the academics like Kissinger were often derided for their idealism and lack of practical experience, Kissinger brought his Army organizational experience to bear along with his deep study and powerful thinking to make a strong impression. Beginning with his friendship and then advisory position with Republican Presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960 campaign, Kissinger bridged his career from the world of academia to the world of government and politics.

Along the way, Kissinger was a prolific writer, and Ferguson uses summaries and analysis of his writings to document his intellectual growth and transition from historical studies to applications of his ideals to current issues like the control and planning for the use of nuclear weapons (his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy became a best seller and secured his reputation in that field). He began to be appointed to higher level advisory roles, including his first assignment to a Presidential level providing advice to the Kennedy White House on the Berlin crisis on 1961 and then Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson (even as he continued to advise the Republican Rockefeller during his 1964 and 1968 campaigns!). His advice was not always welcomed, but it was respected and often proved right by hindsight. While Ferguson shows that Kissinger remained an idealist, avoiding the acceptance of cynical short-term decisions, he also shows that Kissinger's ideas matured and changed to meet real-world conditions that he experienced first hand in Germany and Vietnam. Kissinger was not a one-note theorist or impractical academic as he applied his intellect and experience to the problems of international politics and governance he encountered. It was ideal training for the leader he was to become.....

.....in Volume 2, which will pick up in 1968 with his appointment by Nixon to be his chief foreign policy advisor. Interestingly, as Ferguson documents, Kissinger was very critical of Nixon from the 1950s onward based on his personal lack of integrity and political differences, as exemplified by Kissinger's support for the moderate Rockefeller. Each man had to recognize the abilities of the other for their partnership to be established and flourish. We see the beginning of that partnership (and it's fruition in Vietnam, China, and around the globe) in the conclusion of this volume, as Kissinger is ready to take his stand on the world stage. Ferguson's second volume is in progress and expected out in 2020 or later. I would like to have learned more about Kissinger the man and not just his accomplishments, but let's hope his subject (still living at age 95 as I write this review in April 2019) is able to receive the credit he deserves from this thorough documentation of his many accomplishments.