Ferguson doesn’t dispute Kissinger’s responsibility for such atrocities, but suggests, in his introduction, that they shouldn’t bear on how we assess his legacy: “Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries – and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor – must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major western European powers?” The US won the cold war, and that means that the “burden of proof” is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”. Kissinger gave Ferguson access to his personal papers, his friends, and himself. Kissinger himself has been caught on tape a number of times admitting he passed information to Nixon. Review of Craig Daigle, The Limits of Détente: The United States, The Soviet Union, and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012). A lot is to be learned about the US occupation of Germany after WWII, Harvard, the Cold War, the National Security apparatus, and Vietnam. Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson, book review: A case for the defence This biography attempts to redeem the former Secretary of State . study of the formation of the young Kissinger, before the idealist became a realist with his selection by President Richard Nixon as national security adviser in 1968. As told, the intrigue not only launched Kissinger’s public career but kicked off a chain of events with catastrophic consequences: Nixon used Kissinger’s intelligence to urge South Vietnam to reject a potential ceasefire (which might have benefited Nixon’s Democratic rival); the negotiations collapsed; Nixon was elected president, after which he appointed Kissinger national security adviser; in office, Nixon and Kissinger bombed Cambodia to pressure Hanoi to return to the negotiating table; the bombing was illegal, so it had to be done in secret; pressure to keep it secret spread paranoia within the administration, leading to a series of covert actions resulting in the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. foreign policy (quoted in various documents, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library). The Times might as well have asked Kissinger to review his own biography. A fact-finding tour of Vietnam in the mid-1960s “awakened the man of action” inside Kissinger. A massive, occasionally bloated (will the next volume also run over 1,000 pages?) Ferguson relies heavily throughout on not particularly interesting block quotes, on to which he tags cursory analysis. Or, better, Ferguson himself, since, along with Roberts, there’s not a nano-difference between the three men, at least when it comes to controversies about war. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics and New York University, visiting professor at New College of the Humanities and senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. “We can see now,” Ferguson concludes, that Kissinger’s “appointment had nothing to do with mythical leads from Paris.” Readers who keep attention through the many layers of conjecture might not be convinced. Having established the terms of the defence in this volume – which covers Kissinger’s life until his 1968 appointment as national security adviser – Ferguson will have to carry through in the next and show that all of Kissinger’s many initiatives, including assaulting Cambodia and Laos, greenlighting Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, waging proxy war in southern Africa, building up Iran (before its revolution) and Saudi Arabia, supporting Latin American dictators, and pushing, as an influential conservative intellectual, for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “produced better results” than “different foreign policies that might have been adopted”. Niall Campbell Ferguson (/ ˈ n iː l /; born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish historian and the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “Divorce is indeed expensive,” he writes, on Kissinger’s separation from his first wife in 1964, “but it can be worth every penny:” Kissinger got to move into an “elegant apartment.” The irony is that it has been Kissinger’s sharpest critics who have most appreciated his acute sense of self, who have treated him, however disapprovingly, as a fully dimensional individual with a churning, complex psyche. Ferguson’s judgment of Kissinger is highly positive, not really surprising, for Kissinger is precisely the kind of man Ferguson admires, because he sees himself in the mirror—someone who was honored in the councils of the powerful, and was himself extremely knowledgeable about history, or at least a slice of history. Kissinger’s Shadow by Greg Grandin is published by Metropolitan in December. Many American policymakers can “just as easily be accused of war crimes”, but it is Kissinger whom critics single out. draws on insights from network theory to examine disruptions across time.Governments and other hierarchies are stable, suggests the author, building on insights by Henry Kissinger, to the extent that they are flexible in the face of changing conditions. How can it be simultaneously true that Cambodia and Bangladesh were strategically marginal and that the outcome of the cold war depended on their destruction? Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger: The Idealist shifts the trajectory of Kissinger studies fundamentally. How, exactly, might one prove that a counterfactual past, infinite in its potential variations, would have been better than the present? Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson review – a case of wobbly logic. Niall Ferguson's Kissinger: The Idealist shifts the trajectory of Kissinger studies fundamentally. Ferguson doesn’t say, but his observations verge on babbitry. The Idealist fills in episodes that were glossed over in Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, such as Kissinger’s childhood in Fürth, Germany, and his experience in military intelligence during the second world war. Niall Ferguson wants us to reject the stereotyped image of Henry Kissinger as a cynical, amoral realist. Ferguson misses the more interesting point. Unlike the revisionists, Ferguson has had access to every part of Kissinger’s vast archive at the Library of Congress, which weighs several tons and comprises 8,380 documents covering 37,645 pages on the digitized database alone. The Idealism-Realism Debate In International Relations: Kissinger’s Diplomatic Resolution, Review of Elisabeth Bini, Giuliano Garavini, & Federico Romero (eds. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. Niall Ferguson interview: ‘Public life these days is a cascade of abuse’, Acute sense of self … Henry Kissinger, pictured in 1959. In contrast, Ferguson, tone deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, condemns him to a literary fate worse than anything that Hitchens could have meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is boring. Why not ask Kissinger? Henry Kissinger. Not to be missed.”-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser. Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist review: new look at an ‘amoral realist’ Niall Ferguson delves deep to challenge the widely held view of the former secretary of state In so doing, Ferguson trivialises his own book: well before mentioning any serious critic, he cites the conspiracy cultist David Icke, who apparently believes Kissinger is one of the human race’s reptile overlords. Eric Idle mocked him, the novelist Joseph Heller described him an “odious shlump who made war gladly” and Christopher Hitchens pronounced him guilty of crimes against humanity. The result is a thorough and complete life and times around Kissinger to 1968, when Nixon selected him as National Security Advisor. I look forward to seeing how Ferguson deals with that later period. Great statesmen have great critics, and Ferguson could have made a case for Kissinger’s greatness by honestly grappling with his many formidable foes. Instead, he tries to trivialise their arguments by dismissing their motivations. He was, Ferguson writes, like a character out of Mission: Impossible. That “very name”, Niall Ferguson writes in the first volume of his biography of the former US national security adviser and secretary of state, “hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation”. Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages. enry Kissinger. Yet throughout, one wonders why Ferguson didn’t make more of the unprecedented access he had to his subject, not just through his private papers but informal social encounters, including dinners at Kissinger’s home in Kent, Connecticut. He wants to rescue Kissinger from history’s dock and depict his life “as it actually was”. His conclusion previews what is to come. Dozens of pages argue against “a succession of writers” who have charged that Kissinger, in late 1968, leaked confidential information about peace talks taking place in Paris between Washington and North Vietnam to Nixon’s presidential campaign. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Book Review Podcast: Niall Ferguson’s ‘Kissinger’ Mr. Ferguson discusses his new biography of Henry Kissinger, and Sloane Crosley talks about her first novel, “The Clasp.” By John Williams The 60s generation revived the anti-establishment and anti-militarist Marx Brothers, who left their mark on everything from the movies of Woody Allen to the activism of the yippies. For instance, Ferguson reproduces a lengthy passage from Kissinger’s published memoir to describe Kissinger’s first impression, as a teenage refugee, of New York. Ferguson tries to goose the narrative. Ferguson tries to defend his subject but is deaf to his darker notes, and manages to trivialise his own book, Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.08 GMT. ‘The Chinese have got capitalism,’ Ferguson exults towards the end of the book. Renowned economic historian Ferguson (Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, 2015, etc.) It was all for nothing, though it did give Kissinger an opportunity to make one of his famous jokes: “We bombed them,” Kissinger said in early 1973, after finally negotiating a peace deal similar to the one on the table in 1968, “into letting us accept their terms.”. Ferguson also gives a thorough—sometimes long-winded—assessment of Kissinger’s use of conjecture and risk in policymaking. For Kissinger and Ferguson, China is, simultaneously, a serious threat to Western dominance and an opportunity for self-affirmation as it downloads – some might say, pirates or hacks – the West’s killer apps. Not to be missed.”-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University Yet the tone is litigious, setting the biographer up as barrister. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. The journalist William Shawcross blamed Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 for giving rise to the genocidal Pol Pot. This judgment, though, undercuts Ferguson’s own insistence that ideas matter; that, indeed, they are the true subject of history. Yet aside from the inconvenience of having to “fly economy the whole way” to Saigon and paying “for his own upgrades”, nothing really happened on the trip other than Kissinger’s realisation that the war, for Washington, was unwinnable. That's 2020 at the very earliest. Photograph: AP. That, to borrow from Groucho himself, is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. Even historian and columnist Dominic Sandbrook, in an otherwise sympathetic review, observed that “Kissinger the man sometimes disappears from view” (Sunday Times, Sep. 27, 2015). Niall Ferguson's Kissinger: The Idealist shifts the trajectory of Kissinger studies fundamentally. He named Kissinger his national security advisor, and Rocky handed him a $50,000 check (equivalent to $325,000 today) as a parting gift. “No rational people take such nonsense seriously,” Ferguson writes, who nonetheless uses such nonsense to open Kissinger’s life story. Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968 by Niall Ferguson Ferguson tries to defend his subject but is deaf to his darker notes, and … He “could scarcely have been less responsible for the fateful decision to escalate the war”, Ferguson states, which is fair enough since he didn’t take office until 1969, well after the escalation. Dika Ojiakor Niall Ferguson in a recent interview explained that he's just begun working on the next volume, and estimated the release date to be in about three years' time. To order Kissinger for £35 (RRP £35) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. “The oft-repeated charge that Kissinger was actuated by self-interest,” Ferguson writes, “seems unfair.” Then what did actuate him? ), Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and Its Economic Legacy (2017), ‘“MAKE BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN”: ANGLO-AMERICAN THOUGHT AND WORLD POLITICS IN THE AGE OF EMPIRES, MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY (30 JANUARY 2017). This isn’t, I think, just laziness; it suggests a reticence to probe his subject’s emotional life lest he confirms already established opinions about Kissinger. Kissinger proved his value to Nixon by taking such outrageous, and, it must be said, shameful risks: as Ferguson concedes, “Kissinger went to impressive lengths to ‘protect his secrecy.’” The president-elect was sold. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Always thorough, often surprising, at times deeply moving, this is an extraordinary biography of the most significant scholar-statesman-strategist of our time, by one of our most accomplished historians. The US dropped more than 6m tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of people. https://www.nytimes.com/.../review/niall-fergusons-kissinger-volume-i.html Mr. Roberts writes:. Kissinger, frustrated at being out of office, hit out at their arms reduction plans and reinforced his reputation as a warmonger. The criticisms of, among others, Hans Morgenthau, the dean of postwar realism; Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, who helped pioneer game theory; and George Ball, a respected career diplomat (who thought Kissinger’s blind support of the Shah of Iran an “act of folly”) , are described as driven either by resentment, envy, opportunism or antisemitism. Always thorough, often surprising, at times deeply moving, this is an extraordinary biography of the most significant scholar-statesman-strategist of our time, by one of our most accomplished historians. Such “vitriol” is “puzzling”, Ferguson says. The war, meanwhile, dragged on pointlessly for years. Then, in 1965, having returned from Vietnam, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to publicly defend the war, though he knew it lost. Among Ferguson’s more novel explanations for why so many people disliked Kissinger is that they didn’t appreciate his jokes, which, he writes, owed much to the absurdism of the Marx Brothers; it “was a characteristic feature of the ‘counterculture’ generation of the 1960s and 1970s that it did not find the Marx Brothers funny”. Always thorough, often surprising, at times deeply moving, this is an extraordinary biography of the most significant scholar-statesman-strategist of our time, by one of our most accomplished historians. After this review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger was published, editors learned that the reviewer, Andrew Roberts, had initially been approached by a publisher to write the biography himself; he says he turned the offer down for personal reasons, and Ferguson was eventually enlisted to undertake the task. Recently, Princeton’s Gary Bass accused him of expediting Pakistan’s 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. The Nixon campaign did, after all, identify Kissinger as a “top diplomatic source who is secretly with us and has access to the Paris talks and other information”. Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. A fact-finding tour of Vietnam in the mid-1960s “awakened the man of action” inside Kissinger. In The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Roberts reviews the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s new biography of Henry Kissinger. That “very name”, Niall Ferguson writes in the first volume of his biography of the former US national security adviser and secretary of state, “hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation”. Ferguson tries to goose the narrative. Ferguson is right to downplay the passing of information to Nixon in 1968. Review of Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (2015) Michael Franczak. The new left did get Kissinger’s humour, but recoiled from its use to serve, rather than mock, power. Saigon would have rejected a potential deal without Nixon’s intercession; Nixon would have won without Kissinger’s help; and, anyway, the information Kissinger passed on to Nixon wasn’t very specific. But the real problem with this out-of-the-gate defensiveness, for Ferguson, has to do with style. Kissinger’s power, still based on a network that crossed not only borders but also professional boundaries, endured long after he left government in 1977, institutionalized in the advisory firm Kissinger Associates, maintained by almost incessant flying, meeting, mingling, dining. Like Ferguson and Kissinger, Roberts was an early advocate for a military invasion of Iraq. The real historical problem that needs to be explained comes after that episode; why, with every lurch to the militarist right, Kissinger lurched with it, from Nixon to the neocons, from Vietnam to Iraq. … He rightly identifies the influence of German idealism on Kissinger – the notion that reality doesn’t exist independently of our perception of that reality – demonstrating his influence, as an a intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s, in shaping our perception of reality, convincing America that there was a missile gap with the Soviets when there was none and urging Washington to confront global communism even in peripheral areas, such as Vietnam. The logic is wobbly. Not to be missed.”-John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University The singularity of Kissinger fades as Ferguson shadow boxes with earlier, more unfavourable biographers, such as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. Niall Ferguson has written what I feel must become a classic for all those in search of the essence of a great statesman whose works, policies and actions have affected all our lives.Indeed it could be said that Kissinger comes alive through this epic biography. No vindication of Kissinger can let this story stand, and Ferguson’s narrative is weighed down by hypotheticals and speculations meant to downplay Kissinger’s role in derailing the peace talks.

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