₊˚✧ ← kissinger
started 2026-10-02 · finished 2026-10-07
my rating: 3 of 5 stars on goodreads
“Critical analysis” of Kissinger makes no little to no effort to properly indoctrinate its readers with a true account of the devastating aftermaths of the most controversial figure in 20th century America’s legacy. Perhaps I can chalk it up to its release year (1974), since only recently has the gravity of his unconventional realpolitik been fully internalized. Still, I had a good time reading this, considering it was a $1 flea market find. Perhaps this would also be better suited not as a biography but as a novella of his tumultuous journey from wartorn immigrant Heinz to Washington’s éminence grise Henry. Kissinger had learned some lessons well, mainly that the virtue of charm was to take him far and wide in his ascent to summit. “Power,” Kissinger admits, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
It is a bit unbelievable how so few seemed immune to it. Almost outlandishly, at his time as an undergraduate at Harvard, where students supposedly self-factioned into either Prof. William Elliott’s cabal or Prof. Carl Friedrich’s (with little to no overlap!), Henry had somehow “managed to be on excellent terms with both.” His tales of woe stretch far and wide in this book, where you are reminded, constantly, be it his swinger status or his unlikely alliances with other members of the Nixon administration (and later Nixon himself), the true feat of a man who learns to command a room with calculated flattery and an uncanny understanding of what everyone in it wants to hear. A series of charm-laden interactions with the right person at the right time seems to have a stronger effect on his life outcomes than anything else.
At times he is painted more ingenuously; a Nazi Germany refugee with an innocent aspiration of wanting to leave the world tangibly better than when he had entered it. A man compelled by such an ordinary desire made this all the more unsettling! It is a good reminder that 'evil' people are not necessarily any more self-interested than the rest of us, and ordinary motives can still lead to tragic aftermaths. My intuitive condemnation towards Henry, which most definitely still exists, and is real and grounded in particular his Cambodia-related exploits, begs me to question my own judgement. I’m a bit frightened by not how different he is from us, but how familiar his motivations remain even when the consequences of his actions are so profoundly different. More than any retention of 1970s political landscape or subtlety of détente foreign policy, which the book does a phenomenal job of explaining through a historical context, I think I internalized this the most.
So, yes, I will still rally Bourdain’s enduring anti-Kissinger war cry, but it would be naive to let this preclude any curiosity about his character. Recognizing the relatability of his desires does not make his consequences any less reprehensible. If anything, it makes it worse! Maybe this was always intuitive to most, but I have come to only fully understand this now.