Angel Jaramillo
Kissinger was an essential author for understanding international politics and one of the most criticized politicians on the planet. The profiles by Niall Ferguson and Christopher Hitchens show these opposing facets.
Henry Kissinger’s biography is a paradox. He is, without a doubt, one of the essential pens for those who seek to navigate the turbulent waters of international politics. His books are a must-read to understand ancient and modern diplomacy. But he is also one of the most criticized politicians on the planet for having committed a series of criminal acts against countless democratically elected governments and populations.
This paradox is evident if we compare what two of his foremost interpreters, Niall Ferguson, and Christopher Hitchens, have to say about him. The Scottish historian – who has already given us books on the History of money, the American Empire, or the digital monopolies of Silicon Valley – was chosen by Kissinger as his biographer. Of Ferguson’s work, conceived as a two-volume biography, only the first, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, has seen the light of day, in which he recounts Kissinger’s intellectual evolution from the time he was an infant in German Bavaria until 1969, the year he began working in the White House as Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor. In his second volume, Ferguson will have to tell us, using Kissinger’s personal archives, his passage through the Nixon and Ford administrations and his conversion into one of the world’s best-paid political consultants.
The originality of Ferguson’s interpretation consists in challenging, or attempting to challenge, the orthodox or classic version of Kissinger, according to which the statesman and writer from Fürth is the incarnation of Machiavelli. Far from having made an apology for political realism, Kissinger, Ferguson tells us, after being surprised by what he found in his private papers, he turned out to be a kind of idealistic thinker. A war refugee during Hitler’s capture of Germany, a counterintelligence agent in the same country during the Allied occupation, a brilliant student who managed to get into Harvard, where he became a professor, involved in American politics in the late 1950s, the young Kissinger was more of a Kantian than a Machiavellian.
Although he does not go so far as to say that he agreed with Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, Ferguson tries to convince the reader that Kissinger was not the realist for whom the national interest is the imperative of all state action. If Ferguson is right – and hence the magnitude of his provocation – then we would have to read his actions in Chile, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other latitudes with new eyes.
It helps Ferguson’s thesis that Kissinger was a critic of Chamberlain’s realist policy of appeasement in dealing with Hitler. It is also supported by the fact that, as a student at Harvard, Kissinger came under the influence of William Yandell Elliot, a scholar of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who led Kissinger to take an interest in the author of The Critique of Pure Reason, the bible of modern philosophical idealism. From the concentrated readings of Kant, the young Kissinger would emerge with a very ambitious undergraduate thesis called The Meaning of History. Ferguson tells us Kissinger was also a critic of the economistic version of the world, according to which human beings must be reduced to their benefit-calculating nature. Thus, the diplomat turned out to be a great critic of the economic realism we would call neoliberalism today. We shall see what Ferguson will say in his second volume, the publication of which has been postponed until after Kissinger’s recent death, which, I suspect, will give Ferguson more freedom to criticize him.
If Ferguson is a brilliant, unorthodox Kissinger apologist, Christopher Hitchens is one of his staunchest critics. In his opuscule – which first appeared in two parts in Harper’s magazine – The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Hitchens attempts an indictment against the former Nixon and Ford Secretary of State, in principle more of a legal nature, but with a strong moral connotation.
Unlike Ferguson, Hitchens casts Kissinger as an infuriating and insensitive representative of realpolitik and accuses him of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and various offenses against international law. The International Criminal Court typifies the first two charges as actions that could bring a head of state to trial. Kissinger never exercised executive power in the United States; even so, if some judicial bodies had prosecuted the Hitchens case against him, the trials would have been varied and lengthy. Among these charges are the deliberate mass murder of civilians in Indochina, conspiracy to mass murder people in Bangladesh, planning the assassination of a constitutional representative of a democratic country such as Chile, with which the United States was not at war; Kissinger’s involvement in assassinating a head of state in Cyprus; inciting and implementing a genocide in East Timor; and personal participation in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist residing in Washington, D.C.
This list would be enough to send someone to jail for several life sentences. Despite the efforts of Hitchens and others, Kissinger was never tried before any national or international court. However, there is testimony that he felt in danger when a Spanish judge arrested Augusto Pinochet in Britain.
For Hitchens, Kissinger’s intellectual pedigree is worthless, and he considers him a low-caliber thinker. In his book, we learn some significant things. For example, Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford not to receive Alexander Solzhenitsyn while presenting himself as an avowed enemy of Soviet communism.
Despite this, the statesman’s work is read with attention by people of all nationalities, and his advice was assiduously sought by presidents, top executives, and academics from all over the world, even before his death. Comparisons with Talleyrand, Richelieu, Metternich, and other executors of the raison d’État are common among those who opine on Kissinger.
Perhaps it is worthwhile to culminate this writing with a personal anecdote. It must have been in 2011 when Stanley Hoffman, one of the great American political scientists, a friend and colleague of Kissinger’s for many years at Harvard, went to lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York. At the end of his lecture, I noticed no one was escorting him out of the building. Realizing this, I approached him and offered to help him. We walked down 12th Street toward Fifth Avenue. At one point, I asked him point-blank, “You were a close friend of Kissinger’s. Do you think he did commit the crimes he is accused of?” Hoffman paused momentarily and answered me, “I think so.”
I left Hoffman at his hotel and headed for my apartment, knowing we could not escape our fallen angels. ~
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