New look at complex Kissinger-Nixon nexus

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-21 08:59

Sir Alistair Horne was born in 1925, two years after Henry Kissinger, but like his great contemporary, he shows no signs of slowing down. In the past decade, he has written four books on his beloved France. Now, in Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year (Simon & Schuster), his 25th book over all, he ventures into different territory.

This authorized portrait offers a comprehensive, penetrating and mostly reliable chronicle that its subject should welcome.

Kissinger has always been acutely sensitive to criticism, and he miscalculated by providing Walter Isaacson full access for a 1992 biography, which was supposed to counterbalance Seymour Hersh's withering 1983 account, The Price of Power. It didn't. Then came Christopher Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).

Turning to two British historians with conservative pedigrees must have seemed the prudent way to restore order: Horne explains that in 2004 he met with Kissinger, whom he has known for almost three decades, and proposed confining himself to 1973, thereby allowing the equally prolific Niall Ferguson, who extolled Kissinger last year in The Times Literary Supplement, to work unmolested on a forthcoming official life.

Despite his ties to Kissinger, however, Horne has not given us a hagiography. He expresses perplexity at what he deems a "certain, extraordinary insecurity" on Kissinger's part, which he traces back to Kissinger's origins as a young Jewish refugee from Nazism. Nor does Horne scant Nixon's own contribution to foreign affairs.

He notes that "from study of the underlying documents, it is abundantly clear that the original thinking, the initiatives, notably the opening to China and the detente with Russia, came from the unceasingly restless mind of Richard Nixon, and not from Henry Kissinger".

But Watergate meant that Nixon was on the run and rapidly becoming a spent force. According to Kissinger, "I was the glue that held it all together in 1973 - and I'm not being boastful." He was right. Nixon may have intensely resented Kissinger's celebrity and influence, but he felt compelled to name him secretary of state while allowing him to retain his post as national security adviser.

At the ceremony, Kissinger later recalled, Nixon's remarks "ranged from the perfunctory to the bizarre", focusing on the fact that he was "the first secretary of state since World War II who did not part his hair".

Horne also goes badly astray in denouncing the Senate Church Committee hearings that detailed the Central Intelligence Agency's misdeeds, which he deems "almost a McCarthy-style witch-hunt against all forms of 'secret intelligence' - and an exercise in self-hatred, and self-harm". In fact, the hearings provided an overdue examination of maladroit American attempts to intervene covertly abroad.

Far more persuasive is Horne's astute depiction of the revolt that Kissinger's emphasis on good relations with the Kremlin triggered on the right. Everyone from neo-conservatives like Senator Henry M. Jackson to Ronald Reagan denounced Kissinger's pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union. And this is not simply a controversy of the past.

Though Kissinger's career of government service came to an abrupt end many years ago, the battles over whether to seek accommodation with foreign antagonists have not.