Briefly, On Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and national security advisor for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, discusses the Vietnam War with LBJ Presidential Library director Mark Updegrove on Tuesday, April 26, 2016. LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin 04/26/2016..

Henry Kissinger long ago passed from being a mere mortal man to being an avatar for debate. Having now finally shuffled off his mortal coil at the age of 100, the debate over who and what Kissinger was, did, and represented will be an academic exercise for another hundred years.

Skipping the grave dancing of social media and without rehashing the entire Cold War that defined the peak of Kissinger’s influence and power, instead we can have a more productive discussion about how we got Henry Kissinger in the first place.

How did one man get so much power, fame, and influence that two Presidents of the United States let him wield almost unilateral authority over foreign policy during such turbulent times? We know the answer is a mix of Kissinger’s own political abilities combined with a legendarily ruthless approach to getting and keeping his own hands on the levers of power. He took advantage of Nixon’s fall and Ford’s weak tenure to do so. Kissinger became a walking example of “the great man” theory in his own time, and parlayed it into an even longer career of advising, pontificating, and talking about just how great he was while the next generation of wannabe greats came and kissed his ring as a step to their own ambitious climbs.

George Will made the observation in his Washington Post reflection that Kissinger saw global conflict like the Cold War as something to manage. There are quotes galore of Kissinger talking about managing world affairs, maintaining “balance”, how he “admired the Chinese” as “scientists of equilibrium, artists of relativity” and on and on. ““The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end,” he wrote in his book about his years in the White House.

One man having nigh unaccountable power prattling on about abstractions like balance and management when there were millions of lives at stake should have been a huge red flag. Kissinger took pride in trying to get all the “sentimentality” out of foreign policy. And while there is validity to that, doing so in totality strips away the human costs of decision making. Throw in “we have to stop the communists, x, y, z this, that, and the other” and such things are contextualized and excused in the moment.

The problem of the great man who sees himself as the manager of world affairs is that no man is great enough to not start believing he knows best how to achieve that balance. Worse, too many folks start to believe him as well, and any chance at normal bounds or accountability go away in inverse proportion to the increase in flowery words of praise and various other accolades.

A blind quote tasting of the above with the names removed could be inserted into a Marvel movie and would sound like the Big Bad of the highest grossing movie in history. The name of the one that prattles about balance is remembered. The big name is wined and dined and gets book deals and board positions. But the folks dusted by those decisions remain nameless, faceless, and other than the occasional outcry mostly unheard in the confines of the comfy Connecticut compounds in which retired statesmen live out their lives.

This is, of course, all perspective with the advantage of hindsight. We see the world with China as a major player that Kissinger saw as a potential gamechanger on the world stage. We have seen the fall of the Soviet Union, and the brief Russian flirtation with something else before the gangster-like oligarchy of the tyrant Putin we currently are dealing with. We have a friend and ally in the still communist Vietnam, but with plenty of dead, wounded, and scarred Americans to show for it and many more dead, wounded, and scarred people throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Kissinger, powerful as he was, didn’t act alone, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson don’t get the vitriol over the Southeast Asia mess that they handed Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger to clean up. The modern folks who are gleeful over memes and depictions of Kissinger in hell don’t seem to have the same anger at the now mythologized JFK or the LBJ that was as complicated as he was profane, both of whom tee’d up the conflicts Kissinger now gets his grave danced on over. There are some lessons to learn there as well.

Meanwhile, for today, the lesson we should ponder on, and long and hard at that, is that Kissinger was right that “History knows no resting places and no plateaus,” and the chaos of the world will never cease to lap upon the shores of America. For every crisis, there will arise leaders who will declare they can manage those waves, and bring back the balance of the slack tide America has mostly enjoyed despite a turbulent world.

We should not only pick and empower those leaders carefully, but understand those decisions have ramifications far beyond just TV sound bites, prestigious lecture series, and book deals. And no one person, even if briefly entrusted with such power and influence, should be beyond accountability not only for how they went about it, but answering for the results or lack thereof. We should seek out leaders with vision but understand that no one leader can have a vision that can manage all of the diverses world all the time for the perfect purposes of just their singular point of view.

Kissinger was not Satan, nor was he a lesser god of superhuman understanding and insight. He attained and used power, then profited greatly from having done so while others lived with the consequences of his decisions. This is a constant story throughout history, of the great person of power, and will be until the end of human time. If you don’t want another Kissinger, understand how we got Kissinger and adjust accordingly. If you think Kissinger was beyond all reproach, understand you are primed and ready for the next Kissinger to wow and dazzle you into unwavering support.

The good, bad, and ugly of the very long and very impactful life of Henry Kissinger is in the books. We should read and study it very carefully.