Reflections on the prickly, ruthless, amoral intellectual that was Henry Kissinger

A few thoughts to add to the many already published about this irresistible but ultimately not admirable geopolitical celebrity

The obituaries have now been published in their thousands, many doubtless requiring a quick update decades after they were first drafted. For it was for his longevity that Henry Kissinger was most notable: as a recent centenarian who was fortunate enough to stay lucid, active and highly quote-worthy until just weeks before his death; as a still sought-after foreign-policy guru and highly paid consultant nearly half a century after he left public office in early 1977; as an object of enduring fascination as well as of deep dislike for war crimes or acts of deadly unscrupulousness that he committed so long ago that it took a read of the obituaries to remind oneself of what they all were.

Everyone will have their favourite obituaries and analytical evaluations. I of course liked the obit in The Economist, though I thought that like Jurek Martin and Malcolm Rutherford in the FT they should have mentioned the fact that Kissinger had illegal wiretaps put on the home phones of 17 journalists and members of his own National Security Council staff. It is true, I suppose, that the paranoid atmosphere of the Nixon White House, with all its tapes and “expletives deleted”, made this less surprising at the time than it now seems, but it still says a lot about Kissinger’s own paranoia and his willingness to break laws. His quip that “the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer” has been widely quoted, confirming how witty he could be, but both then and now it acts as a diversionary tactic.

Not surprisingly, therefore, I also liked an opinion piece in the New York Times, headlined Henry Kissinger: the hypocrite by Ben Rhodes, a former member of President Obama’s NSC. Rhodes outlined especially well the enduring impact of Kissinger’s amoral actions in places such as Chile, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos on America’s reputation as well as any claims it might make about seeking to defend “the international rules-based order” (which is not a claim Kissinger will ever have made, at least not to my knowledge). Sometimes these days people are inclined to write that during the Cold War the severity and clarity of the ideological and military confrontation with the USSR was such as to make brutal actions such as those somehow more acceptable, but I am not sure future Cold War historians will agree. Those actions led to a considerable backlash against America especially but not only in Europe, one that it will be reasonable for future historians to argue might have made the Cold War last longer. Rather less contestable is the fact that memories of such actions lie behind some of today’s unwillingness in Latin America, Southern Africa and many parts of Asia to support the West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war in Iraq certainly plays a big part in that, but so do Kissinger’s actions in places like Chile, Angola and Indochina.

Perhaps the most rounded critical evaluation that I have read was by Edward Luce in the FT: The Many Legends of Henry Kissinger. Admittedly, Ed Luce is currently working on a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who succeeded Kissinger in the NSC under President Jimmy Carter and in many ways was his rival as America’s leading grand strategist of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, so his analysis may be coloured by that perspective. However I liked his mapping of Kissinger’s many inconsistencies as well as his observation that once the great man had figured out the lucrative business model of his consulting company, Kissinger Associates, in 1982, the undoubted sharpness of his analytical mind was always made subservient to the need to maintain access to all the world’s corridors of power. Everything he said, especially about China and Russia, needed to be placed in the context of that powerful conflict of interest. The man who showed utter ruthlessness in exercising power while he was holding it then showed a new ruthlessness in suppressing whatever views he held, lest they hinder his business. In a way, this makes his continued quote-worthiness rather impressive, for he always managed successfully to frame whatever he was saying in a grand enough intellectual framework and rooted deeply enough in his own experience that any and all lack of specifics or candour were either overlooked or ignored.

Where he did show great candour, however, was in his concern for his own reputation, and most particularly for the legacy from his just-under-a-decade in office. When I was at The Economist, one thing about Henry Kissinger stood out. It was that any and every time we wrote about him, which frequently took the form of reviews of the many books that have been published about him and his period, a letter would invariably arrive from Kissinger a few days later disputing something that had been said. One I recall in particular concerned a book that mentioned his illegal wiretapping of his own staff and the fact that he had never apologised to them for having done it. His letter adopted a vexed tone, claiming that the article was unfair: he did, he said, regret the fact that he had had to do this. I took some pleasure in replying to the effect that regretting that “he had had to do this” wasn’t the same as making an actual apology. Some years later, when I met him at some international conference or other shortly after handing over the editorship, he commented that he “hoped that under your successor The Economist will be rather kinder to me than it was under your chairmanship.” I took that as a compliment.

One last anecdote. Rather like another great-but-prickly grand strategist of his era, Lee Kuan Yew, Henry Kissinger never seemed to let his annoyance at what we had written get in the way of meeting to share his views on global affairs. On one occasion when I was visiting him at the Kissinger Associates office in New York, while I was waiting his assistant asked me the following question: “do you know the right place to sit?” “Well, I suppose not”, I said, “so perhaps you had better tell me”. Duly instructed on which chair to sit on, I could enter the room and allow the great man to occupy his platform in the way he preferred, with one foot on his coffee table and his visitor in an appropriately subordinate position.