Review of THE INEVITABILITY OF TRAGEDY: Henry Kissinger and His World
97 and more relevant than ever ...
Henry Kissinger is still alive. He is 97 and writing yet another book. He is still trying to both explain himself and teach us a thing or two. Lost amidst the rancor his name inspires is the story of a world-class mind that was shaped by some of the great thinkers of the 20th century. The growth of that mind and his efforts to employ it in the explosively uncertain world of foreign policy is the basis of this extraordinary book. Rarely have I been so consistently ”educated” by a book. Gewen writes in a lucid, ironic and persuasive way about subjects both complex and profound. It is often funny and might have the greatest collection of quotations I have ever read. Kissinger is left alone to be the enigmatic genius who will, in fact, never die. Gewen does not take sides – Kissinger is far too interesting to be either lionized or demonized. To avoid such extreme judgments is to embrace a radical mind. If you want to return to being a student sitting in a class with the world changing shape in front of you, read this book. It is tough. Read it in the morning with your cup of coffee. Please annotate.
The first chapter is a case study – Allende’s Chile. Gewen begins with one of the many graveyards Kissinger’s critics have buried him in. The list is long – Chile, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia to name a few. Chile is a good one to pick. Gewen lays out the “facts” and like a good case study, it generates more questions than answers. It is the story you will carry in your head as you proceed through the implicit and explicit sources of Kissinger’s education. The chapter on Hitler is stunning and so troubling. I wish Gewen had wrapped things up in a more efficient manner; however, his deft treatment of intellectual history is so inspirational and instructive that it left me longing to return to school. It is a tutorial that would have made Kissinger’s teacher – Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt & Hans Morgenthau – proud.
The following are several thoughts from this book that I hope I can retain while thinking about the frightening world we are living in now. Writing them, I realized how much I was leaving out. There is a grandeur of ideas and expression that suffuses this intellectual history of our greatest and most controversial foreign policy leader of the 20th century that must be read to be captured.
International relations is a godless, dangerous terrain all too often made worse by the high ideals of a Wilson or any ideology or “movement” that has captured a desperate people (e.g. Hitler). Foreign policy requires diplomats versed in the trade and in field expertise who know when to lie, to compromise, to shut-up, to give up, to kill. Democracy is too often wielded as an ideology and thus the country the world relies on most (us) to keep things only marginally safe is all too often caught in traps of her own making – Vietnam & Iraq. Kissinger and his mentor (all a product of the Jewish diaspora in the 1930s from what remained for many a Eden of thought and culture before the rise of Hitler) thought America was and is the world’s last best hope but worried that as long as she thought of her democratic world in ideological not practical terms, we were in trouble. The ability of a voter to shun Clinton over sour grapes about Bernie and allow Trump to be President is a perfect case in point. Hitler got to power on the back of just such thinking – in a functioning democracy.
The Hitler chapter is equally mesmerizing and frightening. Trump kept getting in the way of my ability to take it in. The careful reveal of how Hitler managed a democratic process (violence & intimidation all along the way) to get in power is almost never acknowledged. We want to think otherwise. We want the devil to come out of the woods. We cannot imagine the devil living within us. Democracy did not protect Germany from Hitler. It has not protected us from Trump.
The Vietnam chapter is all too familiar … the names, the dates, the events. The horrors of Cambodia lurk within. The duplicity of Nixon and the long delay in withdrawing and the thousands that died because of it. It is depressing stuff – Vietnam ALWAYS is. It so apparent that the American Century cracked over this war. Kissinger was genuinely worried about American credibility and honor because in his German Jewish world such things are what had saved the world once before. If people have to die, so be it. The alternative might be so much worse. It is depressingly familiar and bit tough to weather. The killer reminder, however, is just how popular the war was right up to 1968. It was popular because we were RIGHT. We represented what was RIGHT. Such thinking is the bear trap of foreign policy. Take two Advil and grow up.
The final frontier of our ideology, however, is American Exceptionalism. Kissinger and his mentors admired the American experiment but thought it was vulnerable to everything we now see in front of us. John Adams and most of the Founding Fathers felt the same way. We have turned their skeptical leap of faith into an ideological trope that carries us into Baghdad, Benghazi and Beirut. We created a naïve narrative that pushed aside our own horrors and tried to say we were the exception. Kissinger might agree that we have had the opportunity to do exceptional things – a long ways away from BEING exceptional. Like many others (including myself), he believed we have one truly exceptional thing going for us – our GEOGRAPHY … and that is now of substantially less value in our new cyberspace world. We doth protest too much whether it is our simplistic, strident evangelical religions or our nauseating flag waving. We are sinners like everybody else. We have been dealt a good historical hand. Let’s not blow it.
The final two sentences say it all. They give nothing away.
Maybe there is no better way of putting this than to say that in Henry Kissinger’s world, the amoral world of statesmen and diplomats, you could allow yourself few expectations. If you were to act at all what had to be accepted was the imperfectability of man, the unpredictability of consequences, the prospect of arriving at no permanent solutions, the inevitability of tragedy.
Barry Gewen
The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World
Barry Gewen (2020)
394 pages (great photo section)