Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year
By Alistair Horne
(Simon & Schuster, 457 pages, $30)
Recently marking his 86th year, Henry Kissinger remains unique
among recent American secretaries of state—indeed, perhaps of all
of our secretaries of state. Born in Furth, Germany, of a Jewish
family obliged to emigrate in the late 1930s, he worked his way
through public high school in New York City and at the City College
of New York. Drafted during the Second World War, he held a minor
position with occupation authorities in his defeated homeland.
Returning to the United States, he took a Ph.D. at Harvard and
remained there as a faculty member until summoned first by New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller as a consultant on foreign affairs and
then (somewhat unexpectedly) by President-elect Richard Nixon to
serve as national security adviser (later simultaneously as
secretary of state).
An extraordinary enough career if it stopped here—but of course
it did not. During his time in government Kissinger negotiated a
drawdown of American troops in Vietnam, engineered the opening of
diplomatic and trade relations to China, pursued a police of
détente with the Soviet Union, and brokered a Middle East peace
which in spite of everything has held these last 40 years. Nor is
his renown at an end. Although a deeply controversial figure to
both right and left in the United States and beyond, he is perhaps
one of the very few foreign policy makers in our history whose
influence and prestige have remained undimmed, perhaps even
enhanced, since leaving public life. His brilliance, his
discipline, even his wit have remained with him in extreme old
age.
This book does not attempt to cover Kissinger’s entire career,
but rather to focus on what the man himself regards as his most
crucial year. Most of the events referred to in the paragraph above
either took place or reached something of an apex during those
months. In most Kissinger played a crucial role, and in one in
which he did not—the downfall of Marxist president Salvador Allende
in Chile—he still stands accused by a defeated and unforgiving
left. Even in a book that supposedly deals with a single year in
American foreign policy the author inevitably must move backwards
and forwards to flesh in the necessary background, so to some
degree we are treated to something of a résumé of the Nixon and
Ford years.
Inevitably, too, Horne at times finds himself writing a dual
biography of Kissinger and his patron Richard Nixon. How could it
be otherwise? “A very odd couple” he calls them—what an
understatement! Nixon, a Quaker from Whittier, California, a
scholarship boy and a classic striver long viewed with contempt
when not outright hatred by the Amer ican establishment, working in
harness with Kissinger, a brilliant refugee intellectual stepped
from the very world Nixon loathed in turn. The contrast does not
end there. Nixon hated meeting people and was uncomfortable in
sophisticated social situations; Kissinger gloried in a wide circle
of friends from journalism, politics, the arts, and literature.
Even at the very nadir of his popularity with the New York lit-crit
crowd, people still called him “Henry” and sought out his company.
The one thing that bound Nixon and Kissinger together was their
“outsiderness,” a status that apparently was sufficient to weather
all of the inevitable storms of day-to-day governance that might
otherwise have torn them apart.
There are two things that make this book very special. One is
the author. Sir Alistair Horne, probably largely known in this
country as a historian of France, has also been a veteran war
correspondent. He served in the British army in the Canal Zone in
the late 1940s and later wrote a classic study of the
French-Algerian conflict. He knows the United States well, but he
knows many other places too. He is the kind of Englishman rather
more common before 1939 than today—a man at home in many corners of
the world. He is on personal terms with a vast range of people who
had firsthand dealings with Kissinger and were willing to discuss
him candidly, not always admiringly. There are brilliant cameo
sketches of personalities all of us have seen up to now only in two
dimensions—my favorite being Leonid Brezhnev, whose less lovely
characteristics (such as anti-Semitism) apparently had a curious
appeal for Nixon. We are treated to private or near-private
glimpses of Syria’s late dictator Assad, Algerian president Houari
Boumedienne, former British prime minister Edward Heath, German
chancellor Willy Brandt, French president Georges Pompidou, and
above all, China’s premier Zhou Enlai.
The book’s other outstanding quality is its access to sources.
Inevitably, Sir Alistair mined Kissinger’s voluminous multi-volume
memoirs, books that many of us have read into but not read in their
totality. But beyond that he has had access to recently
declassified notes on con versations (MemCons) or transcripts of
confidential telephone communications (TelCons). Some of these make
particularly piquant reading, and give a good sense of what
Kissinger was like in difficult situations. My personal favorite is
an exchange between the secretary of Sstate and the Israeli
ambassador Simcha Dinitz. At the time the Israeli forces had
cornered Egypt’s Third Army and Israel was refusing to lift its
siege even though the war was fundamentally over. Listen to the
conversation:
K: Why don’t you let them break out and get out of there?...Why
can you not let them take the tanks with them. The Russians will
replace them anyway.
D: We will not open up the pocket and release an army that came
to destroy us. It has never happened in the history of war.
K: It has also never happened that a small country is producing
a world war in this manner. There is a limit beyond which you
cannot push the President. I have been trying to tell you that for
a week…You play your game and you will see what happens…You are
destroying the possibility for negotiations, which you want.
Needless to say, Kissinger got what he wanted—a negotiated
outcome that laid the groundwork for an Egyptian-Israeli peace
several years later.
Inevitably, in a book of this sort the author has to address a
number of fundamental criticisms of the subject. He is particularly
eager to explain and defend the policy of détente with the Soviet
Union—an approach that eventually divided the Republican Party and
led to a 30-year realignment in American politics that only now
seems to be ending. He rejects the notion that the peace agreement
with North Vietnam achieved in 1973 could have been easily obtained
in 1969. He is quite emphatic in attributing the failures of
Nixon’s policies—particularly the collapse of our South Viet namese
client—to the specter of Watergate, and in this his narrative is
utterly convincing.
Kissinger: 1973 is one of the most intriguing books on
American history to appear in many years. Even when dealing with
fairly technical subjects like arms control it never fails to hold
the reader’s attention. And it reminds us how difficult are the
tasks of those entrusted with America’s power. Those who have
convinced themselves that a mere change of tone will solve all of
our current foreign policy problems need to read this book even
more than the rest of us.
