How did Henry Kissinger go from being the man the Playboy Bunnies would most like to have for dinner to a man hated by both left and right; a man who became an issue in a presidential campaign forty years after he had left government. Gewen answers that question in this intellectual biography. It's fascinating.

Kissinger was fond of citing the following story: When the nefarious Cardinal Richelieu died in 1642, Pope Urban VIII is said to have declared: “If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not … well, he had a successful life.” I have never been fond of Kissinger, considering some of his policies and actions to be wrong-headed, if not criminal. That being said, Kissinger was the great realist and perhaps the most influential Secretary of State in the 20th century. How he got there is the intriguing subject of this book.

Kissinger distrusted democracy, suggests the author, after witnessing the rise of Hitler through the democratic process. (The early section of the book details how quite precisely.) The lesson Kissinger learned from that is that democracy fails at thwarting tyranny and totalitarianism. Free speech can co-exist in a non-democratic society. He had the choice of returning to Germany following WW II but having served in the Army and achieved his American citizenship, he had been thoroughly Americanized, even coming to appreciate those from the fly-over states as being a more accurate representative of American culture. He wrote in his memoirs, “Nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice, as in small-town America.”

Kissinger despised pieties, believing that, like Richelieu, chaos can be a useful instrument of policy and furtherance of goals for the nation-state. He ultimately lost his position in government by losing support of both the left and right. His mantra was simply that the end (order and stability) justified the means. National interest was paramount, and morality in its service was futile and counter-productive.

The author goes into some detail discussing the influence of Leo Strauss, Hans Morganthau and Hannah Arendt on the politics of Kissinger. All were of German Jewish background. Arendt is best known for her seminal works on the origin of totalitarianism, a pertinent topic given that the 20th century gave rise to innumerable tyrannical isms: Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and now Islamism. All of them had seen the failure of democracy during and following the Weimar Republic and the democratic rise of Hitler. This left all of them suspicious of democracy and populism in particular. Each opposed quantification as a way of making decisions (the direct opposite of Robert McNamara.) Foreign policy and history have a subjective quality, and one needs to beware of idealism, marching into some place you don't understand even with the best intentions.

Kissinger’s role under Nixon was surprising, given Nixon’s constant belittling of Jews and overt anti-Semitism. So many in both parties feared Nixon’s irascible temper and general craziness, they saw Kissinger as a temperate restraint on Nixon. He was the ultimate realist, believing power should be used in the service of the nation, and he initially opposed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) arguing that the Russians would be emboldened by the policy as they could never believe the West would initiate its own destruction. His preference was for tactical nuclear weapons, and it was important the enemy believed the U.S. would use them. That was the only realistic self-defense strategy.

A very readable and intriguing book. ( )

$6. Very Good Condition.