Restoring Henry.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: "Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist" and "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman" - Book review

Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968

by Inall Ferguson

Penguin Press, 1008 pp.

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman

by Greg Grandin

Metropolitan Books, 288 pp.

Niall Ferguson, Kissinger's authorized biographer, begins the arduous task of rolling his subject's fallen reputation back up the hill. The historian Greg Grandin kicks it right back down again.

In 1940 the young Henry Kissinger, caught in a love quadrangle, drafted a letter to the object of his affections. Her name was Edith. He and his friends Oppus and Kurt admired her attractiveness and had feelings for her, the letter said. But a "solicitude for your welfare" is what prompted him to write--"to caution you against a too rash involvement into a friendship with any one of us."

I want to caution you against Kurt because of his wickedness, his utter disregard of any moral standards, while he is pursuing his ambitions, and against a friendship with Oppus, because of his desire to dominate you ideologically and monopolize you physically. This does not mean that a friendship with Oppus is impossible, I would only advise you not to become too fascinated by him. Kissinger disclaimed any selfish motive for writing, loftily quoted from Washington's farewell address, and regretted with some bitterness Edith's failure to read or comment on the two school book reports he had sent her. Would she please return them for his files?

It is unfair to judge a man's character by a jealous letter that he drafted (and did not send) at age sixteen. Yet here, to a remarkable extent, is the future nuclear strategist, national security advisor, and secretary of state. The reference to Edith's attractiveness bespeaks the charm and flattery for which Kissinger would become famous. Secrecy and deceit are present also: he went behind his friends' backs and coyly advised against a relationship with "any one of us," which of course really meant the other guys. By trashing his buddies in order to get a girl, Kissinger displayed ruthlessness. The letter is written in what Christopher Hitchens memorably described as Kissinger's "dank obfuscatory prose," which relies on clinical-sounding phrases like "dominate you ideologically." And, of course, the letter betrays vanity. How could anyone fail to be dazzled by his book reports!

The conservative historian Niall Ferguson presents this letter in Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968, the first volume of his massive two-part biography of the controversial statesman. Yet Ferguson reads the letter and reaches a different conclusion. It stands out, Ferguson writes, not because it reveals unsavory character traits that Kissinger would display throughout his public life, but for its "analytical precision and psychological penetration." Ferguson concedes that the letter is "solipsistic," and the product of youthful jealousy. Yet he cannot help but admire the young strategist at work: even the boy Kissinger could analyze a series of interlocking relationships, parse the competing interests, and make a power play.

Ferguson is Kissinger's authorized biographer, and in 1,000 pages he begins the task of rescuing his subject's tarnished reputation. It is a steep climb. The foreign policy chief for Presidents Nixon and Ford has been portrayed in dozens of books and by countless witnesses as a coddler of dictators, a cynical practitioner of realpolitik, a war monger, a suck-up to superiors, and a tyrant to subordinates--his genius and wit matched only by his underhandedness. Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger is the most entertaining such book, but unbecoming portraits also appear in prominent works by Seymour Hersh, Robert Dallek, Margaret MacMillan, and, most recently, Greg Grandin, whose Kissinger's Shadow just arrived in August. Woody Allen had his say in the mockumentary Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story, and so did the novelist Joseph Heller, who described Kissinger as "an...