This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. Eric Idle mocked him, the novelist Joseph Heller described him an “odious shlump who made war gladly” and Christopher Hitchens pronounced him guilty of crimes against humanity. Kissinger, frustrated at being out of office, hit out at their arms reduction plans and reinforced his reputation as a warmonger. The 60s generation revived the anti-establishment and anti-militarist Marx Brothers, who left their mark on everything from the movies of Woody Allen to the activism of the yippies. Ferguson tries to goose the narrative. Ferguson tries to goose the narrative. “No rational people take such nonsense seriously,” Ferguson writes, who nonetheless uses such nonsense to open Kissinger’s life story. Ferguson tries to defend his subject but is deaf to his darker notes, and … Saigon would have rejected a potential deal without Nixon’s intercession; Nixon would have won without Kissinger’s help; and, anyway, the information Kissinger passed on to Nixon wasn’t very specific. For Kissinger and Ferguson, China is, simultaneously, a serious threat to Western dominance and an opportunity for self-affirmation as it downloads – some might say, pirates or hacks – the West’s killer apps. Yet aside from the inconvenience of having to “fly economy the whole way” to Saigon and paying “for his own upgrades”, nothing really happened on the trip other than Kissinger’s realisation that the war, for Washington, was unwinnable. Great statesmen have great critics, and Ferguson could have made a case for Kissinger’s greatness by honestly grappling with his many formidable foes. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. He rightly identifies the influence of German idealism on Kissinger – the notion that reality doesn’t exist independently of our perception of that reality – demonstrating his influence, as an a intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s, in shaping our perception of reality, convincing America that there was a missile gap with the Soviets when there was none and urging Washington to confront global communism even in peripheral areas, such as Vietnam. In contrast, Ferguson, tone deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, condemns him to a literary fate worse than anything that Hitchens could have meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is boring. Niall Ferguson interview: ‘Public life these days is a cascade of abuse’, Acute sense of self … Henry Kissinger, pictured in 1959. Ferguson relies heavily throughout on not particularly interesting block quotes, on to which he tags cursory analysis. … But the real problem with this out-of-the-gate defensiveness, for Ferguson, has to do with style. He “could scarcely have been less responsible for the fateful decision to escalate the war”, Ferguson states, which is fair enough since he didn’t take office until 1969, well after the escalation. Ferguson is right to downplay the passing of information to Nixon in 1968. ), Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (2017), ‘“MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN”: ANGLO-AMERICAN THOUGHT AND WORLD POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES, MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY (30 JANUARY 2017). To order Kissinger for £35 (RRP £35) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. As told, the intrigue not only launched Kissinger’s public career but kicked off a chain of events with catastrophic consequences: Nixon used Kissinger’s intelligence to urge South Vietnam to reject a potential ceasefire (which might have benefited Nixon’s Democratic rival); the negotiations collapsed; Nixon was elected president, after which he appointed Kissinger national security adviser; in office, Nixon and Kissinger bombed Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to the negotiating table; the bombing was illegal, so it had to be done in secret; pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration, leading to a series of covert actions resulting in the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. Ferguson tries to defend his subject but is deaf to his darker notes, and manages to trivialise his own book, Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.08 GMT. That “very name”, Niall Ferguson writes in the first volume of his biography of the former US national security adviser and secretary of state, “hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation”. A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) A fact-finding tour of Vietnam in the mid-1960s “awakened the man of action” inside Kissinger. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics and New York University, visiting professor at New College of the Humanities and senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. That “very name”, Niall Ferguson writes in the first volume of his biography of the former US national security adviser and secretary of state, “hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation”. How, exactly, might one prove that a counterfactual past, infinite in its potential variations, would have been better than the present? Then, in 1965, having returned from Vietnam, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to publicly defend the war, though he knew it lost. The singularity of Kissinger fades as Ferguson shadow boxes with earlier, more unfavourable biographers, such as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. He wants to rescue Kissinger from history’s dock and depict his life “as it actually was”. Among Ferguson’s more novel explanations for why so many people disliked Kissinger is that they didn’t appreciate his jokes, which, he writes, owed much to the absurdism of the Marx Brothers; it “was a characteristic feature of the ‘counterculture’ generation of the 1960s and 1970s that it did not find the Marx Brothers funny”. For instance, Ferguson reproduces a lengthy passage from Kissinger’s published memoir to describe Kissinger’s first impression, as a teenage refugee, of New York. “The oft-repeated charge that Kissinger was actuated by self-interest,” Ferguson writes, “seems unfair.” Then what did actuate him? Not to be missed.”-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University foreign policy (quoted in various documents, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library). Niall Campbell Ferguson (/ ˈ n iː l /; born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish historian and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Kissinger’s power, still based on a network that crossed not only borders but also professional boundaries, endured long after he left government in 1977, institutionalized in the advisory firm Kissinger Associates, maintained by almost incessant flying, meeting, mingling, dining. Why not ask Kissinger? It was all for nothing, though it did give Kissinger an opportunity to make one of his famous jokes: “We bombed them,” Kissinger said in early 1973, after finally negotiating a peace deal similar to the one on the table in 1968, “into letting us accept their terms.”. draws on insights from network theory to examine disruptions across time.Governments and other hierarchies are stable, suggests the author, building on insights by Henry Kissinger, to the extent that they are flexible in the face of changing conditions. A lot is to be learned about the US occupation of Germany after WWII, Harvard, the Cold War, the National Security apparatus, and Vietnam. The real historical problem that needs to be explained comes after that episode; why, with every lurch to the militarist right, Kissinger lurched with it, from Nixon to the neocons, from Vietnam to Iraq. Unlike the revisionists, Ferguson has had access to every part of Kissinger’s vast archive at the Library of Congress, which weighs several tons and comprises 8,380 documents covering 37,645 pages on the digitized database alone. Ferguson doesn’t say, but his observations verge on babbitry. Such “vitriol” is “puzzling”, Ferguson says. Dozens of pages argue against “a succession of writers” who have charged that Kissinger, in late 1968, leaked confidential information about peace talks taking place in Paris between Washington and North Vietnam to Nixon’s presidential campaign. Kissinger himself has been caught on tape a number of times admitting he passed information to Nixon. Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages. That's 2020 at the very earliest. Always thorough, often surprising, at times deeply moving, this is an extraordinary biography of the most significant scholar-statesman-strategist of our time, by one of our most accomplished historians. Yet throughout, one wonders why Ferguson didn’t make more of the unprecedented access he had to his subject, not just through his private papers but informal social encounters, including dinners at Kissinger’s home in Kent, Connecticut. Not to be missed.”-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University https://www.nytimes.com/.../review/niall-fergusons-kissinger-volume-i.html That, to borrow from Groucho himself, is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. The Idealist fills in episodes that were glossed over in Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, such as Kissinger’s childhood in Fürth, Germany, and his experience in military intelligence during the second world war. The new left did get Kissinger’s humour, but recoiled from its use to serve, rather than mock, power. Yet the tone is litigious, setting the biographer up as barrister. The journalist William Shawcross blamed Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 for giving rise to the genocidal Pol Pot. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Ferguson doesn’t dispute Kissinger’s responsibility for such atrocities, but suggests, in his introduction, that they shouldn’t bear on how we assess his legacy: “Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries – and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor – must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major western European powers?” The US won the cold war, and that means that the “burden of proof” is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”. ‘The Chinese have got capitalism,’ Ferguson exults towards the end of the book. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. The war, meanwhile, dragged on pointlessly for years. I look forward to seeing how Ferguson deals with that later period. The Idealism-Realism Debate In International Relations: Kissinger’s Diplomatic Resolution, Review of Elisabeth Bini, Giuliano Garavini, & Federico Romero (eds. Or, better, Ferguson himself, since, along with Roberts, there’s not a nano-difference between the three men, at least when it comes to controversies about war. Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson, book review: A case for the defence This biography attempts to redeem the former Secretary of State . Book Review Podcast: Niall Ferguson’s ‘Kissinger’ Mr. Ferguson discusses his new biography of Henry Kissinger, and Sloane Crosley talks about her first novel, “The Clasp.” By John Williams