The first volume of Niall Ferguson’s magisterial biography recounts the afternoon when Kissinger was almost aimlessly crossing Harvard Square and bumped into his friend Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and counselor to President Kennedy, who offered him a coveted opportunity to advise the Johnson administration.
Though he was respected as a policy theorist who boldly articulated the “flexible response” nuclear doctrine vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, he had backed the wrong presidential contenders, most recently Nelson Rockefeller. As towering a figure as he remains at his centenary, it’s important to remember that even into his 40s, Kissinger still had almost no firsthand knowledge of the world beyond America’s east coast establishment (from which he still felt somewhat ostracized) and wartime Germany. His own life reflected the constant interplay of contingency and agency. But Kissinger’s work was much more than an avatar of Thomas Carlyle’s infamous dictum that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Instead, it taught me the correct answer to the high school debate I had just completed – “does the man make the moment or the moment make the man?” B oth. Kissinger’s own former colleagues such as historian Ernest May of Harvard criticized the book as a haphazard collection of maxims, as if to ignore Kissinger’s consistent focus since his days as a doctoral student writing about Metternich and Castlereagh: not historical events in themselves but the statesmen who made history and why, with chapters bearing the names of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Napoleon III and Bismarck, Adenauer and Eisenhower. (Together with Paul Kennedy’s even girthier Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, it also left little room in my backpack for anything other than a toothbrush.) The 800-page tome immediately became my Berlin Wall of geopolitical literature, my first textbook in classical realism, my constant companion as I Euro-railed for weeks on end. My parents mailed me care packages full of Doritos and letters from friends, but the cardboard box I most eagerly awaited came in April 1995, containing a hot-off-the-press copy of Kissinger’s instant classic Diplomacy. At the same age he was when he arrived in New York as a Jewish refugee, I left New York to attend a German gymnasium high school near Hamburg. I first visited Berlin just weeks after the Wall came down, sparking my love affair with the homeland he fled as a teen. Even nearing 95 years of age, he didn’t miss a beat. It happened to be November 9, so I asked him if he recalled where he was and what he was doing thirty years earlier – precisely the day the Berlin Wall fell. A couple of years ago in my native India, we chatted just before going on stage in New Delhi. There was never a dull conversation with the original Dr.
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