Henry Kissinger

Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times

Abraham R. Wagner, Abraham Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415837392
• eBook ISBN: 9781135042721
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Henry Kissinger: Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times explores the influence of statesman Henry Kissinger in American foreign relations and national security during 1969 to 1977.

Henry Kissinger arrived in the U.S. as a young Jewish refugee and went on to serve as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford. The consulting firm he founded has advised every U.S. president since. In this book, Abraham R. Wagner reveals how Kissinger used his knowledge of history and international relations to advocate a realpolitik approach to U.S. foreign policy. Through seven selected primary source documents, Wagner tracks how Kissinger became an iconic figure in international relations that polarized opinion during 1969 to 1977, a critical and controversial period of American history.

This book will be useful for students interested in American history and security studies, especially those with an interest in U.S. international relations during the latter years of the war in Vietnam.

PART I

HENRY KISSINGER

CHAPTER 1

THE EARLY YEARS

Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, in the town of Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923 during the time of the German Weimar Republic, to a family of German Jews.¹ Kissinger’s father, Louis Kissinger, was a schoolteacher and mother, Paula (Stern) Kissinger, was a homemaker. The family adopted the surname Kissinger in 1817 when his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb, took the name after the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen.² The Jews of Bavaria had been subjects of continued repression for centuries, and by the time of Kissinger’s birth the Jewish population of Fürth had shrunk to about a thousand. Here Jews were increasingly treated as aliens, even though their families had lived there for generations. Among other things, they were barred from attending public gatherings, such as league soccer matches.

As a youth, Heinz loved soccer and played for the youth side of his favorite club and one of Germany’s best soccer clubs at the time, SpVgg Fürth. By most accounts his interest in soccer was greater than his skill, but his enthusiasm for the sport got him elected as team captain one year. Indeed, throughout his career Kissinger continued to follow the Fürth team and remains a fan to this day.

Louis wanted his two sons Heinz and Walter to attend a state-run high school, or Gymnasium, but they were rejected as Jews in a period of rapidly increasing German anti-Semitism under Hitler and his Nazi party. Instead Heinz attended the Israelitische Realschule which was academically as good as the state school, and here he studied largely history and English, as well as religious subjects including the Bible and Talmud.

Kissinger always regarded his father Louis fondly and has been reported as saying “he was the gentlest person imaginable, extraordinarily gentle” and “good and evil didn’t arise for him because he couldn’t imagine evil. He couldn’t imagine what the Nazis represented. His gentleness was genuine, not the sort of obsequiousness that is really a demand on you.”³

Fleeing Nazi persecution, the Kissinger family moved first to London, England, in 1938, and subsequently arrived in New York City in September 1938 when Henry was fifteen. Many things about America and New York City impressed the young Kissinger, but one thing that stuck in his mind was that here he did not have to cross the street to avoid being beaten as a Jew by other non-Jewish boys coming toward him. He was most eager to become an American and be regarded as one.

The Kissinger family first settled in the Washington Heights section of upper Manhattan where they became part of the existing immigrant German-Jewish community. While the young Kissinger assimilated quickly into American culture, he never lost his pronounced German accent. Some accounts attribute this to a childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak, although he was never known to be either shy or reluctant to speak following childhood.⁴ Kissinger ultimately returned to his birthplace in Bavaria several times as an American, first as a member of a U.S. Army counterintelligence unit, and later as a distinguished scholar and eventually as a renowned statesman.

After moving to New York the Kissingers joined the Orthodox Jewish Congregation K’hal Adeth Jeshrun that had been recently formed by Rabbi Joseph Breuer who also emigrated from Germany. Breuer was not only strictly Orthodox, he also tried to impose his orthodoxy on the entire neighborhood. Kissinger faithfully attended what was known as “Breuer’s synagogue” although this may have been more out of devotion to his father than a sincere belief in Jewish orthodoxy.

Socially Kissinger moved away from Jewish orthodoxy, joining the Beth Hillel youth group which was composed largely of Reform Jews, who were mostly from Germany as well. Most of the Beth Hillel members attended Edith Peritz’s ballroom dance classes, as did Kissinger. Among the girls in the dance class Kissinger met Anneliese Fleischer, also a refugee from Germany, who was later to become his first wife—Ann Kissinger. Ann and Henry began dating and attended Beth Hillel activities together.⁵ Ann’s family were Conservative Jews, who did not keep kosher, but Kissinger’s parents were happy enough with the couple as it seemed to make Henry less withdrawn and more social.

Unlike many of his friends in what was a tight-knit German-Jewish community, Kissinger was far more serious about assimilating into the larger American culture, even though he retained a pronounced German accent. While some of the friends became successful in business and other professions, they retained a close tie to their ethnic heritage—but not Kissinger, who saw rapid assimilation as a key to independence and greater success in the long run.

In New York City Kissinger attended George Washington High School. After his first year at George Washington High School as a day student, Kissinger attended school at night as a part-time student, working days at a shaving brush factory. Following high school he first attended the City College of New York (CCNY) where he studied accounting, although he did not have any great love for accounting. He later recalled, “I thought it might be a nice job.” At CCNY he was known not only for an inquisitive mind, but also for achieving perfect grades in all subjects.

Kissinger’s studies in were interrupted in February 1943 by World War II when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, ultimately serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Europe, where is native fluency in German was a significant asset. This early training and experience in the field of military intelligence provided a depth of understanding in the intelligence area that served him greatly in his later years, at Harvard and in government service.

Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also became a naturalized U.S. citizen on June 19, 1943 at the age of twenty.⁶ Following basic training, the Army sent him at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, to study engineering but the program was cancelled, and Kissinger was then reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division where he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, his commanding officer and fifteen years his senior. Kraemer was also a fellow immigrant from Germany who quickly noted Kissinger’s fluency in German as well as his intellect, and arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. As Kissinger remembered Kraemer, he was “the greatest single influence of my formative years, and his inspiration remained with me even during the last thirty years when he would not speak to me.”⁷

As Kissinger recalls it, this relationship changed his entire life. After the division reached Europe, Kraemer arranged to have Kissinger transferred to the G-2 (Intelligence) section where the two worked together and, after work, walked the streets of battle-scarred towns at night during total blackouts while Kraemer spoke of history and postwar challenges in his stentorian voice—sometimes in German, tempting nervous sentries.

Over the next several decades, Kraemer shaped Kissinger’s reading and thinking, as well as influencing his choice of college. It also awakened in the young Kissinger an interest in political philosophy and history, which inspired both his undergraduate and graduate theses, and became an integral and indispensable part of his life. Kraemer dedicated his life to fighting against the triumph of the expedient over the principled, and Kraemer’s values were absolute. Like the ancient prophets, he made no concessions to human frailty or to historic evolution; he treated intermediate solutions as derogation from principle.

Later Kraemer’s perspective became the source of the estrangement when Kissinger became part of the policy-making world and entered the realm of the contingent. For Kraemer, the prophet, there could be no gap between conception and implementation; the policy maker must build the necessary from the possible. Kraemer saw values as eternal, independent of time. For the policy maker, absolute values must be approached in stages, each of which is by definition imperfect. The prophet thinks in terms of crusades; the policy maker hedges against the possibility of human fallibility. The policy maker, if he wants to avoid stagnation, needs the prophet’s inspiration, but he cannot live by all the prophet’s prescriptions in the short term; he must leave something to history.⁸

Kissinger returned to the Europe he had fled as a youth and saw combat with his division, volunteering for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge when American forces were able to advance into Germany. Kissinger, only an Army private at the time, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld, largely owing to a lack of German speakers on the division’s intelligence staff. In just over a week in Krefeld, he was able to establish a new civilian administration for the city.

Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and promoted to the rank of sergeant. With his new promotion, he commanded a counter-intelligence team assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs in Hanover. In recognition of these efforts Kissinger was awarded the Bronze Star. Later, in June 1945, Kissinger was appointed the commandant of the CIC detachment operating in metropolitan Bensheim, in the Bergstrasse district of Hesse, where he was responsible for the “de-Nazification” of the district. While this position gave Kissinger extensive authority in the area, including the powers of arrest, he took extraordinary care to avoid abusing these powers against the local population by those under his command.

Following the conclusion of World War II, Kissinger remained in the Army until he was reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King in 1946 and subsequently continued to serve in this role as a civilian employee following his separation from the Army.

NOTES

1. An extensive account of Kissinger’s early life can be found in Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Volume 1, 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin Books, 2015). See also Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, updated, 2005) and Marvin L. Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1974).

2. “Die Kissingers in Bad Kissingen” (in German). Bayerischer Rundfunk. June 2, 2005. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007.

3. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 22–23.

4. Kissinger’s brother is reported to have said this shyness was because he only talked and never listened. Kissinger is also quite adept at turning his German accent “on” and “off” as it suits the occasion and even varying the intensity as he sees fit.

5. For a time Ann (she changed the earlier spelling of her name Anne to Ann, but throughout this book we use the spelling ‘Ann’) was also dating Kissinger’s friend Walter Oppenheim, who was more polished and a better dresser, although she decided to date Kissinger exclusively much to the surprise of her friends. Ann was seen as “deep” and “aloof”—which also could have been said about Kissinger. See Ralph Blumenfeld, Henry Kissinger (New York: New American Library, 1974).

6. When Kissinger departed for the Army in South Carolina, it was the first time in his life he was not living within a German-Jewish community.

7. Henry A. Kissinger, Remembrances: Fritz Kraemer, October 8, 2003, available at www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/100803.html.

8. Ibid.

CHAPTER 2

HARVARD AND NEW YORK

After returning to the U.S. in July 1947 Kissinger received his A.B., summa cum laude in political science at Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandel Elliott, whose patronage gave him a great boost beyond his undergraduate years. Kissinger subsequently received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. His doctoral dissertation, “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich),” was not simply a subject of graduate study, but an understanding of realpolitik that deeply influenced his world view and shaped his approach to foreign policy throughout his career. Few other students saw these historic figures from nineteenth century diplomacy as relevant to the atomic age.

In 1952, while still at Harvard, Kissinger served as a consultant to the director of the psychological strategy board, a committee formed to coordinate and plan for psychological operations during the Truman administration. The board had members drawn from the Departments of State and Defense as well as the Central Intelligence Agency to help with covert activities during the Korean War. This association served to keep Kissinger’s hand in the intelligence and covert operations area even as a graduate student.

On finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard, Kissinger looked at the academic options open to him as a new degree holder and was offered beginning faculty posts at the U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Henry Kissinger in American History and Foreign Policy
• Part I Henry Kissinger
• Part II Documents
• Selected Bibliography
• Index