What Kissinger Didn’t Understand

Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.

Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity. Because he was, undoubtedly, human—brilliant, insecure, funny, gossipy, curious, devious, self-deprecating, cruel. In Martin Indyk’s book Master of the Game, about Kissinger’s successful efforts to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War, you meet a diplomat with a deep knowledge of the region’s history and personalities, operating with great subtlety and stamina to bring about a state of equilibrium that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. If you read Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram, about the 1971 Pakistani civil war that created Bangladesh, you meet a policy maker with a shocking indifference to human life, willing to aid Pakistan in committing genocide so that Islamabad would continue to be a conduit between Washington and Beijing.

The same worldview informed Kissinger’s actions in both wars. He valued order above all, and order was created in the relations between great powers. Small countries and the lives of ordinary people didn’t matter; America’s missionary idealism was an incorrigible threat to stability. This view led him to warn against humanitarian intervention, and to sacrifice millions of Indochinese and thousands of Americans in prolonging the Vietnam War well after it was lost, in the interest of maintaining “credibility.”

I met Kissinger half a dozen times, and at each encounter I struggled to square my hatred of the historical figure with the charming man in front of me. The first was in 1979, when I was in college; I mentioned that I knew his daughter, Liz. “Does she give you a hard time?” Kissinger intoned dryly. “She gives me a hard time.” I regret to say that I was too polite to ask, “About Cambodia?” The last time was in 2019, at a fundraiser for a library in Connecticut, where we were both selling books. A woman I quickly decided must be his wife, Nancy Kissinger, appeared at my table: “Henry would like to talk to you.” I looked over at an ancient man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, massively slouched in front of a stack of books and a line of autograph seekers. I could hardly believe he was still alive, let alone still publishing.

My biography of Richard Holbrooke—who admired, reviled, and mostly envied Kissinger—contained several unflattering references to the great man, and I wondered if I’d been summoned for one of his notorious chewings-out. Instead, Kissinger told me that he’d enjoyed my book, and added that he’d always considered Holbrooke a good friend. “But the vimin!” he exclaimed, his Bavarian guttural full of wonder. “I didn’t know about all the vimin!” To which I failed, again, to reply that Kissinger was a well-known womanizer himself, or to remind him that, in late 1976, in his last days as secretary of state in the Ford administration, he had called Holbrooke “the most viperous character I know around this town”—a kind of compliment, if you think about the source.

But my most memorable encounter was with a more public Kissinger. It was in the fall of 2015, at a dinner for Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German consul’s residence in Manhattan. I was a last-minute addition to the table and found myself seated next to Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive TV sex therapist, whose presence was a mystery to me. Kissinger was lecturing the chancellor about her decision to allow into Germany a million refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He could appreciate the humanitarian desire to save one person, but a million? That was like Rome opening its gates to the barbarians—it would irrevocably alter “German civilization,” said the author of a dissertation on Metternich, an admirer of Bismarck, and a Jewish refugee from German civilization.

Dr. Ruth, who had been silent throughout dinner, now spoke. Almost apologetically, she told us the story of how, when she was 10, shortly after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo had taken her father away from their home in Frankfurt, and she had never seen him again. Two months later, she was put on a train to Switzerland—part of the rescue of Jewish children just before the start of the war. “If not for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today,” Dr. Ruth said. Kissinger could not have missed her point. They had both been refugees, but only one of them seemed to remember what it had been like. The conversation moved on, but it was now clear why Merkel had wanted Dr. Ruth there.

The problem of Kissinger is not simply the paradox of a man with appealing personal qualities who did some terrible things. After all, he did some good things, too. His diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China remade the world for the better, at least for a time (the world is always un-remaking itself). But the gifts that allowed him to see three or four steps ahead in great-power relations also occluded his vision, sometimes resulting in a strategic myopia. “If you disregard the human costs and the human reality of your decisions, you’re missing not just the moral consequences but the reality of the situations with which you’re dealing,” one of Kissinger’s former colleagues told me upon the news of his death. “In the long run, that reality shapes the policies of nations like our own, and the strategic moves then fail.”

The impersonality of Kissinger’s view of international relations led him to believe that the great powers could order the world’s affairs long after that was possible. He didn’t anticipate that Vietnamese nationalism would defy Soviet control after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. He didn’t see, or perhaps care, that the U.S.-China relationship (which made him rich) could damage America’s manufacturing base and empower Chinese authoritarians. When Russia invaded Ukraine, his analysis seemed to come out of the late Austro-Hungarian period.

The brilliance of Kissinger’s diplomacy in the early ’70s was the last flare of a dying Westphalian light. His heroes were 19th-century statesmen, and he brought their approach to the 20th. He understood world leaders far better than he did the people they led or the rising problems that transcended states. Neither ideological movements nor social conflicts nor human lives were as real to him as the international game of chess.

“Imagine a chessboard in which each piece was actually a king or queen, or the pawns were children, and every time you sacrificed a pawn, a child was killed,” the former colleague said. “You might play chess differently.”