Niall Ferguson on Kissinger the Idealist

Secretary of State under presidents Nixon and Ford Henry Kissinger was a master of realpolitik cold calculating or was he with us today the author of a new biography Kissinger the idealist Neil Ferguson on uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Neil Ferguson has taught at Oxford Cambridge the Stern School of Business the London School of Economics and elsewhere professor Ferguson is currently a professor of history at Harvard beginning next year who will become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford author of a dozen major works on economics military history and diplomacy professor Ferguson has just published the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger Kissinger 1923 to 1968 the idealist Neil Ferguson welcome it's nice to be here visa alright in brief defend your subtitle Henry Kissinger idealist it does sound as if I'm being contrarian just for the sake of it but in fact almost as soon as I began reading through his private papers which are at the core of this volume I began to see that my assumptions were quite wrong I thought I was going to write a book called something like American Machiavelli maybe American Bismarck because that's what I'd been led to expect by previous books on close inspection Kissinger at least the young Kissinger turned out not to be a realist at all in fact he clashed with Hans Morgenthau the art realist of the 1960s and as I delved into his development I realized one that he had seen the appeases of the 1930s as realists and that was certainly no compliment given what he'd experienced in the 1930s and 1940s - he immersed himself in the work of Immanuel Kant when he was at Harvard and three he became a committed opponent of all materialist theories of history including Marxism Leninism while he was a graduate student so he was an idealist in at least three senses and in in that regard this is not a contrarian subtitle I think he gets at the very heart of the matter a couple of wise to get out of the way Henry Kissinger himself has written three volumes that could be considered autobiography and half a dozen other volumes in which he unfolds his thinking and he's the subject of dozens of other works why another biography of Henry Kissinger this is a book in two halves this first half stops at the moment he walks into the White House to start working as Richard Nixon's national security adviser in January 1969 his memoirs cover the period pretty much after that so there's very very little about kissinger's not just his early life the first half of his life because the first half of his life really write down until he was 46 was an academic life in large measure the life of an intellectual of a professor at Harvard but before that there's an even more interesting life life as a soldier and before that life as a refugee so most of what is in this book covering that period of his life from 1923 to 1968 is pretty much unknown and nobody previously had access to the papers that cover that toilet so one more question on the wise personal to you you've written as I said a dozen big books on economics diplomacy pew I think it's your breakthrough book in career terms on the site on the first world war why is Henry Kissinger how long did this first volume alone take ten years alright I did a few things along the way along the way and then the second volume has yet to be written I assume the filing cabinets have taken shape but there you have another year or two at least in this project three more years all right why is this man worth over a decade of your life I've written two kinds of book in my career those that are works of synthesis trying to write overarching books based on the researches of others like the of war the book that you mentioned or the ascent of money that financial history of the world that I wrote a few years ago the other kind of book is is the book that's based on deep primary archival research like my history of the Rothschild family right those are the hard ones to write and I have to say I'm prejudiced towards them because those are the really big contributions to scholarship if you get them right and I had been spoiling to write another book on the scale of the Rothschild book when the idea of a biography of Henry Kissinger came along it was his idea full disclosure and I initially said no because I thought it'd be too difficult I thought there would be way too much stuff and I also thought that Christopher Hitchens would be beastly to me if I did it wasn't really off-putting but it seemed a daunting task and then I thought what other book could I now that I've moved to the United States take on that is about a major American subject unlike most major American subjects this one has his roots in a German Jewish manure that I know pretty well from previous research and so it suddenly hit me that there were few better American subjects I could take on credibly and at the same time I was dead curious to understand better the Cold War I've done a lot of work on the First World War and the Second World War and the Cold War starts to loom larger in my imagination as a subject for proper historical study we're far enough away from it that I think we can do that all right you write about this in the epilogue you call this book an education in five stages this is television we're going to skip and hop through this I don't even know if we'll get to all five stages but surely stage one Germany the United States back to Germany the young Heinz Kissinger enforced tell us how this family give us a bit about what his upbringing is like and then get him to the United States Seward is around the ugly town next door to Nuremberg in South Germany Franconia and Heinz Kissinger as he was originally known was born there in 1923 in the midst of the chaos of the German hyperinflation by the time he was in his teens Hitler had come to power and being extorted Nuremberg was being next door to one of the hot beds of Nazism the family got out in the nick of time his father was a schoolteacher deeply devout Orthodox Jew but also somebody immersed in German cultura the mother was the one with the vim and vigor and she had the nouse to know that they had to bail and they left in 1938 just months before the Kasana pogrom so what what is it about the Kissinger kissing gu family lots didn't leave right lot simply couldn't believe what they were seeing and discounted what they were hearing oh that's just a politician he's saying it because he has to why did they leave well one you needed to have somebody do vouch for you in order to get onto the quota of refugees that the United States would admit from Germany and luckily kissinger's mother had a relative a distant one but one she knew well enough to vouch for them secondly I think his mother was somebody who understood very well the risks that they were running probably her husband was more hesitant because he was more emotionally invested in Germany and in his status as a teacher in a secondary school which was a high-status civil servant like role in the Germany of those days so I think it was the mother who said we've got to leave and and they were lucky because at least a dozen probably more than a dozen members of the family stayed and died in the Holocaust including Kissinger's own grandmother vanished down kneel they come to the United States they live in on the northern end of Manhattan Island and this I suppose I should have known this but I simply didn't want thinks of Henry Kissinger is the full blown into the early in my mind the earliest images of Henry Kissinger he's striding across Harvard Yard not a bit of it he's a student at CCNY and he's working nights in a well tell us about that he's working on a shaving brush he was working days in the shaving brush Factory and working nights to study first in high school and then later on City College yeah he's a refugee and they came with Nixon nothing and joined a great many other people in Washington Heights who'd fled we stopped the film right there and you have young Henry Kissinger a recent recent immigrant to this country like tens of thousands of other Jewish exile from Germany stop the film at that moment is there anything to suggest that by the time he's 45 he'll be about to become one of the most powerful men in the world assisting Richard Nixon absolutely nothing in that sense this is an American dream story in itself because he's 16 he's struggling to learn English he's struggling to learn baseball soccer had been his game even a king soccer fan in Germany he has to adapt but he adapts at the astonishing speed so fast that yes he can dream of becoming an accountant and that's the aspiration when once again history intervenes and deals him another card he's conscripted he's called up and joins the US Army becomes a citizen as so many people did in that time and becomes an American as a result of army training so this is the other great transformative moment in the young man's life he finds himself catapulted back across the Atlantic and finds himself back on German soil just six years after he'd left in late 1944 facing the Siegfried line as as a rifleman so this is an extraordinary aspect of Kissinger's life that most people have never given any thought to he's a thin giltia lives in GI but a obviously bright one who is spotted by another bright GI Fritz Cramer another refugee from Nazi Germany who spots the intellectual potential and Cramer is the one who plucks him out of being a rifleman and turns him into a counterintelligence agent pretty luckily because the mortality rate for riflemen at that time as you run up to the Battle of the Bulge is very high he was still pretty near the frontline but less exposed than the guys who were really doing the fighting and this is an extraordinary sequence of events very well documented because Kissinger wrote a good deal about it at the time and wrote back to his parents pretty regularly so we have somebody who's by the age of he's still in his early 20s as I recall he had he's a conscious that he's lost a large part of his family to the Holocaust he's seen combat yeah that's actually that's confirmed he actually sees combat and then he remains in Germany after the war and becomes a part of the denazification program hunting out former yes Nazis he also witnesses the liberation of a concentration camp that's a searing experience before he even knows the fate of his own family just outside Hannover they liberate one of the smaller camps at Arlen and Kissinger sees the Holocaust face to face meets its victims and writes an extraordinary little essay about it called the eternal Jew which I quote in food in the book that's absolutely revelatory makes one realize just what an extraordinary Troma he must have undergone but I used that word trauma with a certain caution previous writers have speculated in certain psychobabble terms about what this did to him we have here his own reflections in letters home to his parents which were very very startling a couple of really important things happen to him in the war one was that he lost his religious faith and this was very hard for his father to take because his father was quite a devout man and the letters on that subject are absolutely fascinating the other thing that really changed him I think was that the experience of war altered his outlook on life and he wrote back to his parents very frankly I'm different and I'm coming back changed though he didn't come back immediately interestingly he decided to stay on for longer than he had to right into the summer of 1947 to try to help this process of transforming Germany from the catastrophe that it was by 1945 into a stable democracy the map was I think the first hint of that idealism that I allude to in the subtitle when you say that he lost his religious faith he ceased to be an Orthodox Jew or he became an outright atheist where are we on this spectrums if that's a fair way to put it he would never never has to me described himself as an atheist but he clearly stopped being an observant Jew only subsequently I think identified himself as an ethnic Jew I think the the observance of Yom Kippur is really all that remains this was a very thing I think that's nothing not nothing right so he's not an atheist in the sense that somebody who completely broke with all kinds of religious faith might be right and because he's a reader of an annual can't but the time he gets to Harvard I think he has a kind of enlightened view of what is unknowable and that's really I think where I would look locate him in in the realm of the Enlightenment thinkers of the late 18th century all right come back teacher again we we have a thousand pages here a life that still isn't over Harvard he goes the war intervening he goes from a young Jewish immigrant at CCNY working days in a shaving brush factory to Harvard College the oldest institution in this country he goes into Harvard and by the time this book ends he still hasn't left undergraduate doctoral student as a young professor so he must be recognized as brilliant exceptional it'll the intellectual prowess gets recognized tell us that story there's a man named William Yandell Eliot that nobody's heard of anymore who was a kind of a bombastic southern professor in the government department an Anglophile had been to Oxford and had read the idealist philosophers there he was the big influence of kissinger's early Harvard years you've got to imagine the scene this young man with her other thick accent comes in and says I'm your tutee and professor Elliot who's very busy and would like to be in Washington advising politician says oh go away and reap the works of Kant thinking that'll get rid of him and Kissinger goes off and reads the works of Kant and in due course writes the longest senior thesis in Harvard's history with the modest title the meaning of history so he made a big intellectual impact Eliot was impressed and took him under his wing and encouraged him not only to immerse himself in philosophy but then to study history and it's important to realize and it's one of the reasons I decided to write this book that Henry Kissinger became a historian and his initial contributions as an academic his doctoral dissertation and first book a world restored a works of history that matters because history Kissinger is unusual as someone who thinks history really matters the generation of the early 1950s thought that social science and science would solve the world's problems he was pretty unusual of that generation in wanting to write a dissertation about the Congress of Vienna but Congress of Vienna come back to that in a moment first it can't and again were galloping here but am I correct is this a fair summary that Conte is important in the education of Henry Kissinger he's an Enlightenment figure so you get this willingness to stick with rationality with reason as far as it will go but he's a German Enlightenment figure so his great work is a critique of Pure Reason he follows reason as far as he thinks it can take you but then he says there are very very severe limits in the way that a french enlightenment figured never would yes right he's do that there's a certain kind of sense of tragedy and Kant is that fair yes and I think what's important is what Kissinger takes from his reading of count which is quite idiosyncratic Kissinger is interested in in camps theory of history and his theory of free will of freedom if you like and Kissinger says there's a problem but Kant seems to say in his essay on perpetual peace that the world is on a trajectory that will ultimately lead to perpetual peace and Kissinger says that's wrong that can't be so deterministic there can't be some inevitable course of history if we have true freedom and freedom matters a lot to this young man and he thinks a great deal about this and comes to the conclusion that that sense of freedom that when we make a choice it really is an exercise of freewill is the most important idea at the heart of Kant's philosophy so I think what you see at this early stage in his career is a preoccupation with the nature of decision-making we are not Kissinger concludes bound by some inexorable historical force propelling us forward we do have something that is an experience of freedom and this leads him to an important early Cold War inside those people who want the Cold War to be a battle between economic systems remember he's writing when that is very much in your air have missed that produced them and Khrushchev says we will bury you and Kissinger says in his door in his senior thesis no no no we must reject totalitarianism even if it's economically better because freedom is more important regardless of economic efficiency in that sense he is an idealist who sets himself an opposition not just to Marxism Leninism but also to the economic determines theories in the United States that were being churned out in the Universities at that time theories of growth that tried to reduce the Cold War struggle to a struggle between economic systems it's so profound because it and so to me unexpected that by study and cut he comes to his profound conclusion that lines him up beautifully with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson if by studying Conte he becomes deeply American yeah in his fundamental intellectual outlook is that right I think so although it's not as if he immersed himself in studying the founding father no that's this is a kind of a coincidence really but I think his commitment to democracy and individual freedom is is very sincere and when it comes to be applied in the realm of foreign policy which he starts to think about it because that's what William Handel Eliot encourages him to do Elliot loves rushing off to Washington to do political advising once he starts thinking about strategic problems he tends to approach them with a pretty absolutist view that democracy is right freedom is right and self-determination is worth fighting for the United States should stick up for countries that are trying to resist communist takeover so there's a fairly straightforward transition I think from the young philosopher through the young historian to the young strategic thinker and on most of the key issues that crop up in the early Cold War Kissinger's pressing for idealism and resisting compromise and and grubby deals there are well let's we just have to touch on a couple of things but quickly because I want to get to the Berlin Wall Kissinger the idealist by 1958 I'm just quoting you Neal here by 1958 this is the year in which Henry Kissinger turns 35 by 1958 Henry Kissinger was an intellectual celebrity alright we've already talked about the intellectual thirty-five years old still speaking with the heavy axe at a Harvard how does he become a celebrity he wrote a book about nuclear strategy nuclear weapons and foreign policy published in 1957 and to cut a long story short he was lucky in his timing because that book came out just as Americans were beginning to fear that the Soviets might catch them up and it was Sputnik the Soviet satellite that really crystallized that fear there was also fear that the Soviets were somehow going to close the missile gap and have more nuclear weapons that fear made his book a bestseller because it came out at just the moment Americans were ready to contemplate the possibility that the Cold War was going to be a closed thing all right he attaches himself or becomes attached to Nelson Rockefeller patrician unbelievably wealthy man by the standards of those days bill Bill Gates would think of nothing much of it now but by the standards of those days essentially permanent governor of New York I grew up in here Nelson Rockefeller was elected governor the year before I was born and didn't step down until I was in junior high school I thought I thought he was governor by God's grace in any event permanent governor of New York and Henry Kissinger advises Nelson Rockefeller and sticks with him when Nelson Rockefeller tries three different times to run for president and never even gets the GOP nomination and a shrewd politic a realist somebody who really understood history would have been able to tell for sure by the third time around that it wasn't Nelson's country why did Henry Kissinger stick with Nelson Rockefeller it's a it's a very fascinating relationship because you have this ambitious because kissing it was clearly ambitious super-smart refugee soldier intellectual and the Playboy of the northeastern establishment and you would have thought that they had nothing in common Rockefellers attitude was that he didn't really read books he was dyslexic in fact but he could get the people who wrote the books and ha them and having heard that Kissinger was smart he essentially added him to his team and Kissinger I think learned the rudiments of American politics in three unsuccessful shots at the Republican nomination and I think there are two striking things here one is the content of what Kissinger advised Rockefeller to do he was normally pushing Rockefeller to take more hawkish lines on foreign policy that the line of attack tended to be the incumbent or the rival is soft on Cold War issues the other interesting thing is and I think this is key to understanding Kissinger as a young man but he doesn't jump ship if he had really been the cynical realist opportunist of previous works why would he stuck around a three-time loser why is he still on board even in 68 when really nobody thinks Rockefeller has a prayer why is he stuck there in 1964 when the Goldwater riots a cowlick carrying all before them and Rockefellers boomed boomed by the mass at the convention was humiliated just up the road here at the Cow Palace right 64 exactly Kissinger is there and it frightens the life out of him to see real American conservatives in full cry so this is important I think because it tells you that Kissinger is not really that calculating in fact on American domestic politics at least he's kind of naive all right he's advising the Kennedy administration and we don't have we just don't have time for the bridge from Rockaway he's advising the Kennedy administration Berlin wall oh that's interesting because he he switches policy oh go ahead and it's important to understanding what look he can't stand this man Richard Nixon and he will not have anything to do with him when Nixon after Rockefellers been knocked out and Nixon is the candidate says can I pick your brains Kissinger invents a trip to Japan just to avoid taking the meeting so he's far more attracted to glamorous John F Kennedy even though Kennedy's a Democrat and is one of those Harvard professors who joins the court at Camelot albeit briefly as an advisor in the Kennedy White House Berlin Wall East Germany's hemorrhaging citizens by 1961 in five astonishing thing one in five East Germans has left for the West many by the simple simple expedient of stepping over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin and getting on a train and leaving the country for the West acting in consultation with the Soviets in August 1961 the East Germans wall off West Berlin and that wall of course will stand until November 1989 John Kennedy's response quote a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war closed quote the wall did solve the problem and Henry Kissinger's response was he deployed it one has to remember how closely deployed the wall and the Kennedy administration's response to exactly all right exactly and one has to remember the stakes were pretty high this is one of the few occasions when Soviet Soviet tanks and American tanks faced off during the entire Cold War it was very crucial to this survival of these German regime and therefore to the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe but this hemorrhage be staunched now from Kissinger's point of view the idealist point of view the Germans had a right to self-determination ultimately you wanted reunification and you wanted it to be under a democratic not a Soviet controlled system and the Berliners did not want to be divided by a wall so Kissinger took putting it crudely the German side and was appalled that Kennedy had effectively cut a deal that avoided a showdown by allowing the wall to be built and and he did allow it I mean really the Americans stood by and watch that wall get built so kissing you was a hawk at that point who felt that there'd been a sellout he saw Kennedy as the realist and I think his position was very much that of an idealist all right the road to Vietnam and quoting one of the chapter titles here in Kissinger idealist John Kennedy has been assassinated Lyndon Johnson is president he has dramatically escalated our involvement in Vietnam we now have a full-fledged war hundreds of thousands of American troops over there Henry Kissinger goes over and does what wait he wasn't a fact-finding mission he realized in the early sixties that Vietnam was going to matter more and more but unlike some academics who are content to pontificate from their armchairs or their studies Kissinger felt he should go because he never been to Vietnam he accepted an invitation from the US ambassador in Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge and he went around not just to Saigon itself but he flew over Viet Cong held territory he went down to armed bases at the sharp end of the conflict and he found out to his horror that the war was going horribly wrong early on he'd taken the view that South Vietnam was just like South Korea the country that you should stick up for once he saw what was happening on the ground took the trouble to go and find that out he realized that the war was in fact unwinnable least unwinnable in the way that the US was waged 1965 64 great and concludes that ultimately there will have to be a negotiated settlement that is the conclusion that he presents when he goes back and meets with his colleagues at Harvard I was very stunned by the story it was one of the documents I first thought to see that in writing actually because it's that it has the feel of a retrospective no no fabrication this is this is an extraordinary interesting diary and all the correspondence that was generated by these trips he made three successive trips to Vietnam and each time he became more and more convinced that the situation wasn't salvageable not just because it was a military mess which it clearly was under Westmoreland's leadership but also because the South Vietnamese regime was rotten to the core he spent a lot of time meeting South Vietnamese leader across the political spectrum and more you saw of them the more he despaired that this state could be could be cobbled together in any way so I think this is very interesting it runs counter to the view which has become somewhat of an orthodoxy that Kissinger liked the Vietnam war so much he wanted to prolong it under Richard Nixon no no he realized very early on that you have to somehow extricate the United States diplomatically and he began working on that problem as early as 1967 which is exactly what I want so from we've already established strands that lead from volume 1 to volume 2 will you hurry up and write the damn thing please but let me just finish this get back to work so a chapter title in Kissinger the idealist waiting for Hanoi 1967 this is in this book as the way you've structured the book this is the fifth and final stage of Henry Kissinger's education his 1967 attempt to engage in peace talks with the North Vietnamese quoting you Neil Ferguson on Henry Kissinger so eager was Kissinger to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough we're talking about Kissinger the master diplomat to end the deadlock that seemed to condemn the United States to either an interminable stalemate or a hazardous expansion of the war that he failed to discern how cynically the North Vietnamese were stringing him along close quote 1967 and Henry Kissinger gets played how did that happen well he was very keen after realizing that things had gone badly roman in vietnam to establish some channel of communication to Hanoi in order to begin a negotiation but how did you do that when the North Vietnamese simply seemed unapproachable there are multiple attempts by the Johnson administration to start a conversation they go through every conceivable route through Poland for example and none of it works Kissinger thinks he has the key because partly for reasons of his academic career he has friends in Eastern Bloc through the Pugwash conferences regular meetings of scientists that brought Soviet and other Eastern Bloc scientists into contact with Western academics but also through France where he is friends and he thinks there's a way of getting this going through my French friends and to two Frenchmen are to be the intermediaries to Hanoi who will somehow get this conversation going the the North Vietnamese had no intention whatsoever of doing a deal in 1967 because they were preparing for what they thought would be the war winning Tet Offensive the very next year so they played along with this because nothing helped to disrupt American politics more than the possibility that there might be peace at hand and if you could only make it look as if it was the Americans who were to blame for that peace not being achieved you absolutely sow dissension in the United States which by this time was beginning to approach a domestic political boiling point sufficiently to cause Lyndon Johnson of course to throw in the towel and not contest the 1968 election so Kissinger's right in there trying to make a breakthrough which the North Vietnamese have no intention of giving him he has endless meetings endless memos wonderful letters to the North Vietnamese that get delivered and this rather interesting figure the North Vietnamese representative in Paris a man named Bo really just plays him for a fool leaps and down the proverbial garden path and Kissinger has a real education in the Dark Horse of diplomacy in 1967-68 a couple of last questions Kissinger the idealist I'm quoting you again kneel in 45 years the book takes him to the age of 45 Henry Kissinger had learned much he had learned the far from simple truth that decision-makers have free will we've discussed that well they must exercise it under conditions of uncertainty and that their choices are usually between evils close quote uncertainty and evils explain this Kissinger has a wonderful insight into the nature of decision-making before he even has to make a big decision when he's still in the academic realm it's what he calls the problem of conjecture you face to some not unappealing possibilities you can act now to prevent disaster but in acting you have some cost or you can play for time kick the can down the road and just hope that you get lucky and disaster doesn't strike and many decisions in foreign policy are like that the difficult thing may succeed in preventing disaster but nobody is ever grateful for your averting a disaster nobody ever thanked the Cold War presidents for avoiding Armageddon which they ultimately did you don't get rewarded in a democracy for avoiding disaster if you succeed in avoiding it so this is the central problem of conjecture the other problem which Kissinger identifies is that you're nearly always being confronted with evils not many options that are presented to you as an American decision-maker are happily compatible with motherhood apple pie and all the other things you've been brought up to revere and in that sense he says to be a statesman is essentially to be a tragic figure because even if you do your job well you won't get much thanks for it in fact you may indeed be blamed and in that sense I think Henry Kissinger had a very strong intimation in the first half of his life of what lay ahead for him when he himself became a statesman this idealism combined with the tragic set again I'm just so struck that he comes at it from a completely different he rejects his to a large extent his Judaism he's certainly not reading a Gustin or Aquinas but he comes right back to a fundamentally judeo-christian understanding of reality that there are sort of transcendent codes to which we we really must aspire but we live in a fallen world yes I think that's right last less question he'll I found this immensely moving and terribly surprising frankly you quote a letter from a young Henry Kissinger to his parents shortly after the end of the Second World War sometimes when I look down our table and see the empty spaces of our good and capable men the men who should be here casualties they're dead I think of the night Hitler's death was announced that night we agreed that no matter what happened no matter who weakened we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all previous her face is meaningful several questions about that all brief am i over reading it or is that a really fun the the intellectual brilliance comes later but this fundamental contact with reality in wartime loss loss of his family loss of friends and this determinate that kind of loyalty that you see it you see in Nelson Rockefeller but here my goodness I am determined to do what I must that's a central I I've heard it said over and over again although I'd never been able to find the citation than to polian claimed if you wish to understand a man you must know it was happening in the world when he was 21 this is the young Henrique is that is that just basic to him all the way through the rest of his life I think saying I'm I think to his generation those who had fought in World War two the fight against totalitarianism never stopped because the Soviet Union which he encountered on the banks of the river Elbe he meets the Red Army and there's a wonderful description of what they're like that he sends back to his parents they were the the new totalitarian enemy and so there's a pretty seamless transition in Kissinger's life from World War two to World War three and in the rest of his career the question is how do you deal with this totalitarian menace you're fundamentally committed to freedom you've seen what total war can do to a country because you've seen the ruins of Germany and you've seen the death camps so so what do you do and that becomes the central problem of his academic career how do you deal with the nuclear threat is there a way of threatening something less than total Armageddon that's the central question of the nuclear weapons book and how do you engage this revolutionary power to turn it into a more conservative status quo path that's the objective of what becomes known as they told last questionable we will do what we would stay to do in our little way what we could to make all to make all previous sacrifices meaningful now I'm asking you beyond volume to even to Henry Kissinger you've spent a lot of time with him writing this book he's a man in his early 90s he's had heart surgery he's a man in his early 90s the United States today 15 Republicans and at least three Democrats contending to become president Russia rising China rising the Middle East in barbaric disarray and in a number of ways the United States pulling back is this moment what Henry Kissinger and his generation what would he say is this moment what he sacrificed for does this moment step fallen into that tradition of sacrificing to make previous American sacrifices meaningful well what is what would his view be of the present moment Kissinger has expressed himself highly critically about the deal with Iran and in his most recent book World Order he's also cast aspersions on other aspects of US policy if you think that we face three main threats today extremist Islam and the chaos that if so is in the Middle East an increasingly aggressive if weak Russia and increasingly ambitious and rich China he I think would argue that we do not have a coherent strategic response to those threats and just to illustrate the point allowing the Russians to become the power brokers over the Syrian civil war is just the kind of thing that Henry Kissinger sought to avoid in the early 1970s allowing the Chinese and the Russians to get closer to one another than either is to the United States is the very opposite of the policy that he and Richard Nixon pursued that led to the opening to China in 1972 so one point about writing this biography and really what drew me to do it and gets me out of bed in the morning to write vol 2 is that we need to relearn some of the key insights about grand strategy about war and peace that Kissinger and other members of his generation learnt the hard way because this generation the generation that is in power in Washington today seems largely to have forgotten those lessons I lied this is the last question was the young Henry Kissinger good company did you find yourself liking this young man I think that there were two young Henry Kissinger's the one that people saw at Harvard who was pleased serious and reserved and spent most of his time working I mean I really do identify with the work autism there's another Henry Kissinger that comes out in this book and that's the soldier who has a Groucho Marx type sense of humor and can get up to some serious high jinks and I think those two Henry Kissinger's coexisted but to have fun I think you needed to see the second one with his dog smokey and his and his enthusiasm for attractive attractive women so there's there's there's a kind of there's a mask behind which the professor conceals the GI Neil Ferguson author of Henry Kissinger 1923 to 1968 the idealist thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Keywords: Kissinger, idealist, Germany, Harvard, statesman, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Nixon

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Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2015