Niall Ferguson’s Critics Should Read His Book

Harry Gelber’s review (December 2015) of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger—Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist—strikes the right note in describing it as “the first half of what may yet turn out to be his masterpiece”. There is no question that Ferguson is poised to deliver something special in the second volume, which, he informs me, will take at least another three years. Even this first volume is a most impressive piece of work. Yet Ferguson’s critics on the Left refuse to give him any credit, not because of what he has written but because of what he has not written about his distinguished subject. They insist that Kissinger was a malignant figure and that an honest account of his development would have revealed the taproot of the “dark side” of his character.

Such critics, of whom Greg Grandin in the Guardian and Mario del Pero in the Washington Post are representative, insist that Ferguson has strained every fibre and every source to represent his subject as a “tormented idealist”, rather than as the “cynical, amoral realist” they see in him. Whatever one’s assessment of Kissinger’s work in public office, from December 1968, all talk of “torment” and cynical realism is out of place in a dispassionate account of Kissinger’s early life. His critics err egregiously by insisting on reading that early life through the lenses of their bitter denunciations of Kissinger’s work as a statesman. Indeed, the claim that Kissinger was always a Kantian idealist at heart receives support from his own most recent work, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (2014), which his critics appear not to have bothered to read.

Gelber makes the odd statement that critical assessments of Kissinger’s role in public life “have centred on the two decades from 1960 to around 1980, when Kissinger was effectively in charge of the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power”. In reality, he had very little influence on that foreign policy before 1969. What he did do, as Ferguson shows quite beautifully, is take a keen interest throughout the 1950s and 1960s in how US foreign policy was being conducted. He thought long and hard about the serious problems of strategy, containment, deterrence and counterinsurgency, wrote many papers as well as several books, and ran seminars at Harvard that brought together many of the finest academic minds to debate the issues of the epoch. If the critics know of evidence that, during these years, Kissinger was a dark and amoral character they have failed to bring it forward.

Mario del Pero asserts that, while Ferguson uncovered remarkable new sources for Kissinger’s early life in Germany and his work as an American Counter-Intelligence Corps officer at the end of the Second World War, he failed to mine the rich literature on the Cold War and thus ended up with a superficial and distorted view of Kissinger’s contribution to the war of ideas verging on hagiography. Del Pero, whose own modest accomplishments are unlikely to merit any kind of biography, concludes by disparaging the length of this first volume, given what he describes as the rather pedestrian character of its subject:

His quasi-Delphic prose notwithstanding, Kissinger was in reality a fairly conventional thinker who followed the vogues of the times far more than shaping them. Despite what Ferguson wants us to believe, he rarely challenged power (or who was in power) as other international relations experts, like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan, were prone to do. In advance of Volume 2, this often pleonastic and redundant first part thus leaves the reader wondering whether Kissinger as an intellectual—realist, idealist or however we choose to label him—truly deserves 1000 pages.

The fastidious will differ in such matters, but I found the 1000 pages consistently absorbing. Above all, I found them a deeply informative introduction to the life and mind of Henry Kissinger, precisely as del Pero put it, “in advance of Volume 2”.

If your aspiration was to become a serious academic historian, you could hardly conceive of a better trajectory than that enjoyed by Niall Campbell Ferguson. He attended Glasgow Academy, then won a half scholarship to Oxford and did both his undergraduate degree (with first-class honours) and his doctoral studies (on business and politics in Hamburg between 1914 and the hyper-inflation of 1923-24), at Magdalen College. He went on to teach at Cambridge University and New York University in the 1980s and 1990s and has produced fifteen major books since 1997. Now he is a professor at Harvard, and a fellow at Oxford, Stanford’s prestigious Hoover Institution and the London School of Economics.

Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was the son of a physician and a physics teacher, who brought him up as an atheist, which he remains. The grim, atheistic political philosopher Thomas Hobbes has been a major influence on his thinking. As a schoolboy, he has related, he was inclined to the humanities, but was unable to decide whether to study English language and literature or history. Curiously, for a young atheist, it was reading War and Peace, a work of literature by a devout (though highly heterodox) Christian, that persuaded him to become a historian. We all owe a debt of thanks to Leo Tolstoy for having so influenced him.

He was already well credentialled, but only forty years of age, when the eighty-year-old Henry Kissinger approached him, in 2004, asking if he would consider writing an authorised biography. It was a remarkable tribute to the young historian from an elder statesman—and no ordinary elder statesman—twice his age. It can only have been that Kissinger had been impressed by Ferguson’s body of work over the preceding decade, starting with Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927, in 1995, and concluding in 2004 with Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

In between, Ferguson had written a two-volume history of the house of Rothschild and world banking (1998-99), a history of the First World War, a study of alternatives and counterfactuals in history, a study of money in the modern world from 1700 to 2000 and, in 2003, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. He had covered much of the terrain that had always interested Kissinger. And, in 2004, Ferguson was appointed to the Laurence Tisch professorship in history at Harvard University, Kissinger’s academic alma mater, where he had made his name as a scholar and strategic thinker long before he became Richard Nixon’s national security adviser in late 1968.

In 2004, Ferguson already had many other projects on the drawing board including his acclaimed book and television series The Ascent of Money. Writing a biography of Henry Kissinger would be a massive undertaking. Being a “conservative”, who supported Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s and endorsed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was aware that, as he writes in his preface to this first volume of the biography, “I would inevitably be savaged by Christopher Hitchens and others. And so, in early March 2004, after several meetings, tele­phone calls and letters, I said no.” This, he comments wryly, “was to be my introduction to the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger”.

The octogenarian Kissinger wrote to him saying it was a pity Ferguson had declined, both because he had only just rediscovered, in Kent, Connecticut, 145 boxes containing his private papers going back “at least to 1955 and probably to 1950”, which he had believed lost; and that “our conversations had given me the confidence—after admittedly some hesitation—that you would have done a definitive—if not necessarily positive—evaluation. For that I am grateful, even as it magnifies my regret.” The diplomacy of the controversial old man prevailed. Ferguson comments laconically, “A few weeks later I was in Kent, Connecticut, turning pages.”

The diplomat chose well and the scholar has delivered, in this first volume, a remarkable book. It is impressive in at least seven distinct ways: its mastery of a mass of detail; its architectonic balance; its felicity of expression; its often striking and elegant obiter dicta about human experience, academic life and world affairs; its insightful and unflinching character sketches of successive American presidents and other prominent figures, as well as numerous other characters in the extraordinary story of Kissinger’s first forty-five years; its uniquely original and strikingly independent assessment of Kissinger’s character and development; and its magnificent stage setting for what is to come in the second volume, which will examine Kissinger as national security adviser and secretary of state.

Yet Greg Grandin, whose own book, Kissinger’s Shadow, was released a few weeks ago, writing in the Guardian in mid-October typifies just the kind of tendentious “savaging” that Ferguson anticipated would come from the late Christopher Hitchens and others. He asserts that Ferguson’s book is an extended, but litigious, lazy and “boring” defence of its subject. He insists that Ferguson has avoided the “dark” side of Kissinger’s character and motivation and that Ferguson is in error—deliberately and culpably—in rejecting the claim that Kissinger helped Richard Nixon sabotage the secret negotiations going on in Paris in 1968 with North Vietnam, in order to get the appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.

But in taking this line of attack, Grandin is jumping the gun. Ferguson argues, very persuasively, that Kissinger was not motivated by “dark” impulses, but by a highly intelligent, complex and perceptive commitment to statecraft and to finding ways to make American foreign and international security policy work better. Moreover, he demonstrates meticulously that Kissinger did not sabotage the Johnson administration or connive in any malign way with Nixon and that he did not expect to become national security adviser at all, right up to the point when Nixon explicitly made him the offer in December 1968. He engages in no convoluted or tendentious reasoning to make his demonstration, but offers a detailed and judicious—not “litigious”—assessment of the roles of many actors in the events leading up to the December 1968 appointment.

Determined to assert that Ferguson is out to exculpate Kissinger in volume two, Grandin appears not to have even read most of volume one. In fact, Ferguson’s long, deeply informed account of Kissinger’s intellectual formation and his disillusionment with the Johnson administration’s war in Vietnam as early as 1965, makes compelling reading. One of the most eye-opening revelations is that criticisms of Johnson’s policies, of the workings of his national security decision-making apparatus and of the conduct of the war in Vietnam that have always been associated with Left-wing critics of the war and, in my own mind, with the thinking of Daniel Ellsberg before and after he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, can be found explicitly in papers and memoranda written by Henry Kissinger in 1965-66.

This is all the more striking because, at least in this volume, Ferguson hardly mentions Ellsberg and certainly shows no sign of having set out to argue that Kissinger anticipated Ellsberg’s Papers on the War or more general public stance after 1971. The difference between the two was that Ellsberg defected from the inner councils of state and sought to change policy by leaking massive quantities of classified documents to the press. Kissinger sought to reshape the inner workings of those councils through his highly intelligent and quite transparent writings up to late 1968 and to take direct responsibility for their workings when offered the chance by Nixon, despite never having liked Nixon as either a person or a politician.

Being a Scotsman, Ferguson came to the study of the Vietnam War from a perspective independent from entrenched partisan disputation in the United States. His candour and detachment are epigrammatically summed up in his remark, at the beginning of Chapter 16, “The Road to Vietnam”: “There are many ways of explaining why the United States came to grief so spectacularly in Vietnam. But the plain fact of it will always be astounding.”

Anyone who thinks that the Vietnam War was an immoral war launched by “evil” or imperialistic Americans has never understood the matter at all. Ferguson puts his finger on the fundamental problem at once in drawing attention to Robert McNamara’s confession that the problem was “above all, the failure of the American decision-making process itself”. And it is in this context that Ferguson’s perceptive account of Kissinger’s thinking about Vietnam is grounded. He writes:

It has long been assumed—since Hans Morgenthau first asserted it in 1969—that Henry Kissinger “supported” the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s and that this was indeed one of the key reasons Richard Nixon offered him the job of national security adviser.

This view is incorrect.

The way in which Kissinger’s thinking on Vietnam developed is set out beautifully by Ferguson. It confutes the Left-wing canard that a “dark” Kissinger was at work on Vietnam in the lead-up to the White House years.

As early as 1962, Kissinger was critical of the handling of the Vietnam War by the Kennedy administration. He deplored what he saw as the cynical manipulation of the South Vietnamese government by the pragmatists of Camelot. In 1963-64, working for Nelson Rockefeller, he urged the liberal Republican to “call on Johnson to tell the American people frankly just what this nation’s policies and objectives in Southeast Asia really are”. He was appalled by the Goldwater wing of the GOP and repelled by Nixon. The 1964 Republican convention struck Kissinger as akin to Nazi politics and worried him deeply. Johnson, of course, trounced Goldwater the hawk in the 1964 election, but then proceeded to escalate the Vietnam War in 1965. Kissinger had no hand in this. As Ferguson remarks, he “could scarcely have been less responsible for the fateful decision to escalate the war in Vietnam”. But he did involve himself in attempting to understand it and offer critical analysis to the administration from outside the government.

“By the summer of 1965,” Ferguson relates, “Vietnam had become not just the most important foreign policy challenge facing the United States but the only one and he thirsted to understand the problem better.” Those who are determined to depict Kissinger as a villain will assert that the Vietnam War was a war to prevent the self-determination of the people of Vietnam and that if Kissinger had been as Ferguson argues, an idealist, he would have denounced the war as simply wrong. Such critics have never conceded how violent and oppressive the Vietnamese communist movement was. But they are, in any case, wrong about Kissinger. By August 1965, Ferguson shows us:

[Kissinger] already knew one thing. This was a war that could not be won by military means. The only question worth discussing was how to negotiate an end to it. It was a question he was destined to spend the next eight years struggling to answer.

Far from being or becoming a sinister rationaliser of escalation, Kissinger set about asking “disquieting questions” about why the war was being fought at all, how it was being fought, how decision-making in Washington was being done and what the implications of the imbroglio were for the United States on the world stage. Just as LBJ was ratcheting up the war, Kissinger penned a memo in which he wrote:

I am quite convinced that too much planning in the government and a great deal of military planning assumes that the opponent is stupid and that he will fight the kind of war for which one is best prepared. However … the essence of guerrilla warfare is never to fight the kind of war your opponent expects. Having moved very many large units into Vietnam … we must not become prisoners now of a large-unit mentality. Otherwise I think that we will face the problem of psychological exhaustion.

This, of course, is precisely what happened over the following three or four years. During that time, Kissinger reflected again and again on what was going wrong and its implications. Above all, and very early, he identified a syndrome of which Ellsberg was to write only years later: the lack of collective or institutional memory that bedevilled operations in Vietnam. When he visited Vietnam in August 1966, he found, to his dismay, “almost no-one who knew about conditions in October 1965 … New people start with great enthusiasm but little sophistication. By the time they learn their job it is time for them to leave.” This is not the language of a dark and amoral “realist”.

Writing in the early 1970s, Ellsberg was to make much of the idea that he had tried, in 1969, to get Kissinger to think about Vietnam in a critical way based on past mistakes. Yet Kissinger had been among the most lucid and candid critics of those mistakes for years before Ellsberg himself became disillusioned with the Vietnam War. In Ellsberg’s 2002 memoir Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, an enormous amount of space is given to discussion of Henry Kissinger. Ellsberg refers to his role in 1969 as an adviser to Kissinger, helping him to “discover uncertainties and alternatives”. But Kissinger had been hard at work on this subject well before 1969. Reading Ferguson one gains a very different impression of Kissinger’s pre-1969 thinking on Vietnam than that recorded in Ellsberg’s memoir. It will, to say the least, be interesting, therefore, to see how Ferguson treats the relationship between the two men in the second volume of the biography.

Central to the architecture of Ferguson’s biography is his attempt to trace the development of Kissinger’s thinking over decades and not only about Vietnam in the 1960s. Grandin asserts that Ferguson’s account makes Kissinger “boring”. This seems to me a perverse judgment. Grandin, convinced that Kissinger was some kind of vaudeville villain, insists that the biographer should have shown the “dark” side of Kissinger that he assumes must have been there. Instead of a Grandin melodrama, however, Ferguson sets the stage for a kind of tragic drama, which may be how the second volume will read. The really boring view of Kissinger is the tired old clichés of the Left. In this new biography we can see the slow development of Kissinger’s personality, his immigrant patriotism, his ideals, his worldview, his relationships with mentors, his analytical acumen, his political outlook (which was anything but cynical) and his attempts to grasp and then shape the machinery of foreign and security policy-making in the United States. The book concludes with a very fine summation, in the fourteen-page epilogue, of what Ferguson calls the bildungsroman of Henry Kissinger—“the tale of his education through experience, some of it bitter”.

One of the projects that Kissinger commenced in his youth, with his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, was an examination of the system of balance of power devised in Europe at the Congress of Vienna to prevent another cycle of disruptive wars on the Napoleonic scale. His dissertation was published under the title A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822. Ferguson reveals that Kissinger planned to make this the first of a triptych of books taking the study up to the collapse of the system in 1914-15. The second volume, which he took to advanced draft form before abandoning, centred on Otto von Bismarck and the rise of Germany in the mid to late nineteenth century. Ferguson’s discussion of this facet of Kissinger’s life is fascinating and beautifully nuanced. Kissinger, he observes, was often accused after 1969 of aspiring to be an American Bismarck, but in fact Kissinger never so aspired. He appreciated the genius of Bismarck, but regarded his achievement as having been “fatally flawed” and as opening the way, unintentionally, to the catastrophe of 1914. Ferguson’s critics seem to have made no attempt to absorb this key finding.

It would be interesting to know how the planned triptych would have played out, had Henry Kissinger abstained from public policy work and concentrated on historical scholarship. When George Weidenfeld, who had published A World Restored in 1957, approached Kissinger in early 1969 to inquire whether he had completed or planned to complete the Bismarck volume, Kissinger responded that he had not only abandoned it, but had burned the manuscript, having realised, as he put it to the publisher, after only a few weeks near the centre of power, “how much I still have to learn about how policy is really made”. As Ferguson found, Kissinger had not actually burned the manuscript. “The incomplete manuscript survived, unread for more than half a century, in his private papers.” Having worked at a level even more exalted and challenging than Bismarck ever had, Kissinger of course was to write both his multi-volume memoirs and his two treatises on foreign and security policy, Diplomacy and World Order. The latter, published only in 2014, may be regarded as Henry Kissinger’s mature reflection on the problems he had pondered over a very long lifetime. It is not a cynical or amoral piece of writing at all, but one fully consistent with Ferguson’s account of how Kissinger’s mind developed and worked.

The epilogue to this first volume of the biography is in itself a beautiful piece of writing, opening with a reference to Goethe’s famous bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and concluding with an invocation of the anti-war comedy Peace by the brilliant Athenian playwright Aristophanes. It is a measure of the quality of Ferguson’s mind that he was able to avoid looking at the early life of Henry Kissinger through the jaundiced lenses that the Left would have had him wear; to examine the subject dispassionately; to have appreciated both the ironies in Kissinger’s circuitous ascent to the West Wing of the White House and the acute dilemmas that lay in wait for him as a scholar-statesman. His accounts of Kissinger’s relationships with his various mentors, not least among them the brilliant, conservative and very private German émigré Fritz Kraemer, whom Ferguson dubs a Mephistopheles to Kissinger’s Faust, considerably enrich our understanding of how the young Kissinger developed.

Ferguson’s argument that Kissinger was a Kantian idealist, not an amoral realist, might stick in the craw of Kissinger’s baying critics, but his argument is compelling. Kissinger worked for Nelson Rockefeller, whose aristocratic liberal Republicanism he admired, despite the fact that Rockefeller was never going to become President. Neither del Poro nor Grandin bothers to address why a cynical realist would have done this. What Kissinger took on from December 1968 had already driven the Democrats, both liberal and conservative, to despair. He chose to take the poisoned chalice and attempt to deal intelligently with the vast challenges confronting the United States. He did so not out of a lust for demonic power, but because he believed such challenges needed to be tackled with as much intelligence as possible. He then became one of the towering figures of twentieth-century statecraft.

The second volume of Ferguson’s biography is something to look forward to. But make no mistake, in this first volume he has produced a masterpiece and one that should be read attentively and thoughtfully, not in the superficial and supercilious manner that Greg Grandin and his ilk have greeted it.