Jeremi Suri says that his study of Henry Kissinger is not just a biog- raphy. It is a
study of Kissinger and the American Century amidst “a narrative of global ...
REVIEWS 154 Jeremi Suri. Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. pp. 358.
Jeremi Suri says that his study of Henry Kissinger is not just a biography. It is a study of Kissinger and the American Century amidst “a narrative of global change.”(4) I agree: this book is more than just an account of the life of the former academic, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State, but perhaps not as Suri frames the work. This book is a monumental evasion. On the surface, evasion would seem a curious term for a study which claims to consider Kissinger through an examination of his thoughts, and which approaches its biographical subject from his time in Germany, tracing his path to the United States military, to Harvard, and then to Washington. It may seem unfair, given the extensive deployment of primary sources, including the author’s own interviews with Kissinger, and his thorough consideration of other publications. But have no doubt: by the time the book pleads in its conclusion, “He was not a war criminal,” (248) and resorts to the default, “No alternative strategic vision for managing the Middle East and other regions of the world has emerged in… place [of Kissinger’s approach],” (274) the supposed critique has turned into strained exoneration. “American century” and “globalisation,” far from being the ends of Suri’s analysis, are no more than narrative props for “Kissinger’s worldview” and its “durability.”(274) And those in many countries who might have had a contrasting view of “his remarkable career”—reduced by Suri to “thousands of people [who] died because of Kissinger’s activities” (248)—are of no relevance. There is some value in this book. When Suri focuses on Kissinger’s life trajectory, his development from émigré to GI to Harvard student to author and political consultant, he opens up possibilities for the consideration of man and context. There is, for example, the portrayal of Kissinger’s distrust of democracy, a distrust which Scott Lucas, review of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, by Jeremi Suri, Journal of Historical Biography 9 (Spring 2011): 154-158, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2011. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License
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stemmed from his experience in 1930s Germany. Similarly, possibilities open up in the author’s attention to, and construction of, Kissinger’s “Jewishness,” as he observes him making his way in American corridors of power. This is a portrayal of a man making the right connections, and using them to become the “social outsider who was a political insider,” (132) although Suri does not quite capture the extent of Kissinger’s combination of fawning and self-promotion in his climb up the ladder. But at some point in this project, Suri was not content with this level of examination. He had to offer a Kissinger as an icon beyond these specific, valuable depictions. Even in the introduction, there is a muddle between the man who embodies an amoral pragmatism in an American Century which “reflected a turn away from democratic idealism and a turn toward the ‘realism’ of strong, authoritative ‘statesmen” (9) and the man who “firmly believed that he acted within the bounds of a strong ‘moral compass’” based on “deeper values buried within the American Century.”(14) The Kissinger who believes the “most fundamental problem of politics” is “the limitation of righteousness” (146) is somehow also the same man who is anchored to “his adopted country” by “a sense of God-given American mission.”(63) This unresolved tension, which Suri tries to ease with the invocation of “pragmatism” linked to “moral dedication,” might have been sustainable if the author had limited his tale to one of Kissinger’s successes. Suri’s most effective portrayal of the Kissinger who moved from Harvard to the White House is of the man who moved from theory to practice in dealing with the limits of American power. And while one can easily take apart Kissinger’s notion of American-led “federalism” in the world of the late 1960s and 1970s—a task Suri never entertains—it is sufficient to note the belief of the National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State in an altered position of the US among both partners and adversaries, as he pursued a changed relationship with Moscow and Beijing, as well as with America’s European allies. However, there are far too many blind spots in the author’s
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vision to maintain the credibility of this effort. Suri’s high praise for Kissinger’s Middle Eastern diplomacy somehow misses the pre-1973 approach, one in which President Nixon and his advisor took the United States very close to an armed showdown with the Soviet Union in 1970. Indeed, Suri makes the remarkable assertion that Kissinger’s efforts “brought peace and stability to the Middle East.”(255) What of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War? The 1979 oil shock? The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon? The first Palestinian intifada? The 1990-91 Gulf War? Latin America does get the rationalising mention of working with “strong men who could mobilize force effectively,” as the “political ‘harassment’ of White House policies in the 1970s increased the incentives for Kissinger to work with regional dictators.”(240) But Angola comes and goes in a paragraph and a half, and East Timor, where far more than Suri’s “thousands” perished after Kissinger gave the green light to Indonesian military operations, is nowhere to be found. Suri does have to deal with Vietnam, of course, and it is here that both the possibility and the failure of his book are illuminated. He makes the telling remark that “for all his insights, Kissinger had little to say about the escalating war.”(188) As National Security Advisor, Kissinger moved from theory to practice to organise the world in his dealings with the Soviet Union and China. He found it far more difficult to deal with countries and peoples who did not fit the Cold War’s standard constructions of power. Kissinger’s lack of comment on pre-1969 Vietnam would be coupled with a presentation of his post-1969 approach in which Hanoi and Saigon—though having to be dealt with—were secondary to his Great Game. But Suri never moves into this difficult terrain. Earlier in the book, he takes shelter in Kissinger’s general invocation of negotiations from strength for a two-dimensional consideration of his subject’s advocacy of limited nuclear war as an option, and he does so again with Vietnam. To this, Suri adds—with no apparent critique— the concepts of “credibility” and “face.” So we are told quickly and clinically that “Kissinger advocated expanding American operations into neighboring states, par-
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ticularly Cambodia.” Suri never mentions the hundreds of thousands who would perish during that bombing and in subsequent events. After all, he never mentions the Nixon-Kissinger contribution to the hundreds of thousands who died in Vietnam—just as he does not write of the descent of Cambodia into the Khmer Rouge’s Kampuchea. For five pages, Suri transcends these simplifications and omissions. He argues that “in Vietnam and other regions [Kissinger] neglected three crucial transformations that challenged the common framework for grand strategy” (192): the proliferation of non-state actors; complexity; and emotion and faith. (One could add states that were not in Kissinger’s conception of grand strategy.) This is at least a recognition that Kissinger’s acclaimed diplomatic approach was not always attuned to the critical issues of peace and stability, let alone the “values” that he may or may not have been pursuing. But this is the one and only appearance of Suri’s reflection. It is far too inconvenient to sustain as he jumps to chapter five, “A Statesman’s Revolution.” Kissinger must remain a beacon for “a careful calibration of means,” “a coherent integration of various challenges,” and “trade-offs that defy simple solutions.”(274) He must remain so because he is no longer just Henry Kissinger. He is, rather, a touchstone, not only for Suri’s American Century, but for Suri’s America of past and present: “attacks on Kissinger are attacks on a generation formed from the experiences and lessons of the Second World War.” So, because he is “not a war criminal”— Suri’s phrase is unwittingly redolent of Nixon’s “I am not a crook”— then we can be assured that we are not war criminals. We do not “feel better about ourselves” because we cast the charge against Kissinger, Suri asserts, but because we absolve him of it and indeed exalt him beyond it. Perhaps it is appropriate, given the artificial constructions of this book, that its limitations are most tellingly exposed by its subject. Asked by Suri, “What are your core moral principles?,” Kissinger sweeps the enquiry aside: “I am not prepared to share that yet.” Suri immediately says that, “Kissinger is a man struggling with this
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question.”(15) Wrong. It is the author, deprived of any resolution of the tension between pragmatism and values, who struggles with the lack of an answer for his “America.” And he does so all the way through to his final sentence with what is very much a personal wish rather than a universal hope: “The 21st century awaits Kissinger’s successor.”(274)
Scott Lucas University of Birmingham
