Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Henry Kissinger’s Catastrophes and Triumphs Changed the World

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Today’s episode is about the controversial life and legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died last week at the age of 100. First as Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and then as an author and diplomacy whisperer in almost every subsequent administration, Kissinger's life is overstuffed with achievements and disasters and breakthroughs and catastrophes—many of which continue to shape the world we live in. Today’s guest is George Packer, an Atlantic staff writer and the author of several books, including ‘Our Man,’ a biography of Richard Holbrooke: another towering American diplomat who was Kissinger’s rival and partner in diplomacy. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: George Packer Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? It's Austin Rivers from Offguard. And I've got some exciting news. Offguard hosted by me and my guide, Pasha Gigi, is officially moving to our own podcast feed. We are now dropping two shows every week. Me and Pasha go way back and talk so much hoops already that we figured it was time to fire up the mics and let you in on these conversations. Every week, Pasha and myself will hit on the biggest stories happening around the league. Tap into the show twice a week on our new Offguard feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today's episode is about the controversial life and legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died last week at the age of 100. First as Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and then as an author and diplomacy whisperer in almost every subsequent administration, Kisinger's life is overstuffed with accomplishments and disasters and breakthroughs and catastrophes, many of which continue to shape the world in which we live.

Today's guest is George Packer, an Atlantic staff writer and the author of several books, including Our Man, a biography of Richard Holbrook, who was another towering American diplomat in the 20th century, who was also Kissinger's rival and sometime partner in diplomacy. Henry Kissinger was born in 1923, in Bavaria, Germany. He emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 15 years old in 1938, before 13 members of his family were murdered in Nazi gas chambers. Before he became the most famous foreign policy figure of the century, Kissinger spent more than a decade at Harvard, first as an undergraduate, then as a PhD student, and then again as a professor and public intellectual. In the 1960s, he became well known as a commentator and scholar on nuclear proliferation, and in 1969, after the election of Richard Nixon, he began one of the most influential and infamous tenures of any foreign policy figure in American history. The Kissinger portfolio is almost exhausting just to count out. As Nixon's national security advisor and then Secretary of State, he was instrumental in orchestrating the end of America's war in Vietnam, the opening of diplomatic relations with China,

detente and arms treaties with the Soviet Union, and even the end of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East. For years, he seemed like a modern incarnation of his idol, the Austrian diplomat, Clemens von Metternich. In 1815, after Napoleon's final defeat, it was Metternich and others who succeeded in containing the militaristic France by creating a balance of power across Europe. For a century, this balance of power preserved peace or something like it, before it collapsed in 1914 with the First World War.

To Kissinger, Metternich was a master chess player, moving pieces around the board of the European continent to preserve stability and order. But the world is not a chessboard. and people are not pawns, even when the powerful prefer to see them that way. Kissinger's politics often involved overlooking extraordinary levels of human suffering, especially in Southeast Asia, where the policies he endorsed led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Kissinger towered over a period of the 20th century when America overall was more optimistic about our ability to change the world for the better.

But Kissinger himself was not an optimist, or at least he was not an optimist, or at least he was not an optimist in the American sense. He was in many ways what the commentator Fried Zakaria called a European pessimist. His fear was that without a balance of power, preserved by a strong American foreign policy position, the thin mask of civilization would be ripped off the face of the earth, plunging us into an abyss quite like Nazi Germany. At the center of his remarkable life is this deep tragedy. Henry Kissinger devoted his career to keeping his life.

humanity from suffering the collapse of order from which he fled, and yet his policies overlooked or contributed to slaughters that nearly resembled the one he escaped. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. George Packer, welcome with the show. Nice to be with you, Derek. In a new article in the Atlantic, you write, quote, Henry Kissinger is a problem to be solved, the problem of a very human in humanity, because he was undoubtedly, human, brilliant, insecure, funny, gossipy, curious, devious, self-deprecating, cruel. End quote. Before we dive into Kissinger's complex legacy, I want to start with a very personal anecdote from your piece that reflects on this very human and humanity, as you call it.

You met Kissinger several times, including one dinner in 2015 with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the sex columnist, Dr. Ruth. Tell me about that dinner and the surprising showdown between Henry Kissinger and Dr. Ruth. I was surprised to see Dr. Ruth there. I didn't know why she'd been invited. It turned out that she and Merkel were friends. I was not surprised to see Henry Kissinger there. Henry Kissinger had a way of showing up at all sorts of high-flying elite events, including dinners at the German consuls of residence for the German chancellor. This was in the middle of the migrant crisis when Germany was announcing that it would admit a million or more Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi and other refugees from war to the sort of the shock of the rest of the continent because the other countries were in varying degrees of resistance to letting them in. Henry Kessinger, over dinner, sitting on the other side of Merkel from Dr. Ruth, began criticizing this decision and speaking in rather apocalyptic terms in that baritone of his

and saying this will alter German civilization. He didn't say destroy, but it seemed to be something close to that. I can understand letting in a few refugees, you know, as a humanitarian gesture, but a million is like the Romans opening the gates of the city to the barbarians. And we're all listening to this, and Merkel was quietly taking it in. And to my right and Merkel's left was this tiny figure, Dr. Ruth, who was both of them, Dr. Ruth and Dr. Kissinger were in their 90s. Dr. Ruth, Dr. Ruth was so small that I had to push in her chair a little bit so that she could eat her soup. She began to tell us that when she was 10 years old, she lived in Frankfurt.

It was 1938, and the Gestapo came to her house shortly after Kristallnacht and took her father away. And the last she saw of him was waving to her as she stood looking out the window as he was bundled into a police van. Shortly after that, she was put on a train to Switzerland in what was called the Kinder Transport, which is a rescue of some German

Jewish children just before the start of the war. And she spent the war in Switzerland. She never saw her father or her mother again. Both of them died in the camps. And she told us that while she was

just before Kristolnacht, there had been a conference in Geneva, or near Geneva, called the Evian conference, where the world's countries debated what to do about Jewish refugees. And essentially, no countries, including ours, expressed any willingness to take in Jewish refugees except the Dominican Republic. And she said, so nothing came of that conference. I hope more will come from this dinner where it concerns that Syrian and other refugees then came from Evian when

I was a little girl. And she said if it had not been for the kinder transport, I would not be here today to talk to you. I was looking at Kissinger while she was finishing this story and I was realizing, aha, now I know why Dr. Ruth is here

and this seems to be a way of telling a man who was very close to her age and who also was a German Jew in the 30s and who also escaped and came to this country. You don't seem to remember what it means to be a refugee, but I still remember. And that was it. She didn't say, she didn't even say that much, but you didn't need to hear it. It was it was pretty, pretty stark and dramatic. And there was this silence and then the topic moved on. And And she had hardly spoken before and she hardly spoke after.

That was what she was there to say. Why don't we just go ahead and make the subtext here? We're going to talk about Kissinger's record in the 60 years between the mid-late 1960s and 23 when he died. He advised basically every single presidential administration in that period. What does that story of Dr. Ruth versus Dr. Kissinger at that dinner table tell us about the Kissinger doctrine? and what some of its shortcomings might have then?

You know, Kissinger might say, I was right. This has changed German civilization. It's changed Europe. Europe is moving to the right. Germany is moving to the right. Right-wing populist parties are on the rise in Sweden, in Holland, and in Germany itself. And this is because you, Madam Chancellor, led in a million people who your country was not ready for and who are changing it. and who cannot be absorbed and assimilated like that because there's too many of them and perhaps

they don't want to be. And so I'm sorry if I seemed cold and heartless toward refugees, but look at what's happened. That would be his answer. In other words, what matters more than the fate of individuals and the moral consequences of policies like Merkel's decision to let in the refugees, is the stability of power, including Germany, which is not a great power, but it's an important country. And anything that threatens stability within a country and between the powers is a danger for a lot of reasons. And I think for Kissinger, the main reason was he feared nuclear conflict between the nuclear armed powers. And so at all costs, he wanted order and stability so that irrational and even chance decisions didn't lead to nuclear war. And he was willing to see

lots and lots of people die in the pursuit of that. And there was a kind of deliberate indifference to their deaths because he didn't think that small countries, and masses of ordinary people should be allowed to take precedence over this imperative of order, of global order in order to prevent global chaos, which could lead to nuclear war. Many of the obituaries of Kissinger mentioned a quote that he attributed to Gerta, which is something like, if I have to choose between order and justice, I choose order. And this goes exactly to your point. Let's go chronologically through his career here.

Henry Kissinger was a scholar at Harvard in the 1950s and 1960s before he was pulled into national security circles under Nixon. He is pulled into government in the late 1960s. He's an advisor to Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential election. And controversy picks up with him almost immediately. You have a book, Our Man. a biography, Richard Holbrook, another very famous diplomat of the 20th century.

And there is this story where you introduce the character of Henry Kissinger in your book. In mid-October, this is 1968, quote, in mid-October, President Johnson finally decided to declare the total bombing halt that others had hoped for in March.

The U.S. and North Vietnam agreed to begin negotiations. But before anything could happen, Richard Nixon sabotaged the chance for peace. On Nixon's orders, the campaign opened a back-channel to Saigon, and convinced president to you to drag his feet with the promise of a better deal for South Vietnam

from a Republican administration. The only outsider with access to the secrets of the American delegation was Henry Kissinger, a White House consultant on Vietnam. Kissinger was secretly advising both campaigns. Was it treason? I cannot think of another word. End quote. George, what do you make of Kissinger's role in the Vietnam War?

Well, so he was a consultant before he was Nixon's national security advisor to the Johnson administration, and he was on friendly terms with lots of Democrats who were involved in Vietnam, including Richard Holbrook, who was at the State Department, and Anthony Lake, who became Kissinger's top Vietnam advisor in 1969. So he was playing both sides. without either side knowing it. He was advising the Humphrey campaign secretly, and he was advising the Nixon campaign secretly. He also was going to Paris, where the peace talks had been going on since March or April, and getting lots of intel from Richard Holbrook, who thought that Kissinger was his friend and colleague in the Johnson administration as a consultant. Holbrook later said, we basically had a, the Nixon campaign had a source inside the peace talks. And it's clear that Kissinger conveyed what he was learning about the peace talks and the status of them to the Nixon campaign. It wasn't Kissinger's decision to open the back channel to Saigon and sabotaged the talks.

that was Nixon's. But Kissinger provided the information that the Nixon campaign needed in order to know they're about to stop the bombing. They're moving toward at least a stage of the talks that could look very close to the ceasefire that the Nixon campaign dreaded because that would send a flood of voters who were staying out of it or who, who opposed Johnson over to Humphrey Johnson's vice president. So it was a crucial moment. And whether it through the election or at least prevented the election from going Humphrey's way is impossible to be sure about. And if I were to charge anyone with treason here, it would be Nixon more than Kissinger

because he was in the position to make these decisions. But it was an astonishing act of betrayal of the, U.S. government and the administration that Kissinger was supposedly working for. Let's stick with the Vietnam War here. So Kissinger becomes national security advisor when Richard Nixon wins the 1968 election. Kissinger is then pulled into government with Nixon with the promise of ending the war in Vietnam with dignity. And in our attempt to disrupt the operations of the North Vietnamese who have established supply chains and sanctuary, in Cambodia, this leads us to embark upon the infamous campaign of bombing Cambodia.

Why did we do this? What was Kissinger trying to accomplish here? Right, a secret campaign in 1969, and that it was followed then by the bombing of Laos, which was bombed even more intensively than Cambodia. And then in May or April, late April, early May of 1970, an actual ground invasion of Cambodia that didn't last very long, but the purpose was to uproot and if possible to destroy the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail of supplies that the North Vietnamese were using to bring men and weapons into South Vietnam. And what were they trying to achieve? They were not trying to win the war because Nixon came in knowing the war was lost. But Nixon and Kissinger believe that the U.S. policy had to show that we were not a weakened,

pitiful giant, as Nixon said in one of his speeches, that we were to be reckoned with, that the North Vietnamese would have to come to the bargaining table knowing that we were capable of inflicting a lot of damage on them, and that that would then allow us to get terms in a peace deal that would at least keep, the South Vietnamese government in power long enough for what Kissinger in one of his memos called a decent interval, which became a notorious phrase. And what did that mean? It meant long enough that after the withdrawal of American troops, the South Vietnamese government would continue to stand for maybe two years. And once it fell, it would no longer appear to be an American defeat. it would be a South Vietnamese defeat.

It's an incredibly cynical policy, all in the name of what Kessender and Nixon called credibility. In other words, it's part of that geopolitical approach that we are talking about, where what matters most is that the U.S. remain a credible great power so that other great powers don't try to take advantage of it and begin to do things around the world that could lead to diminishing our power further and toward Kempark. chaos and war breaking out elsewhere. So he was willing, and Nixon was willing, to extend the Vietnam War by four years from January 69 to January 73 when the Paris Peace Accords were

finally signed, to bring Cambodia into the war, which led to the overthrow of the neutral government of Prince Sienouk and the takeover first of a pro-American military government and then the takeover of that government by the Khmer Rouge, which followed with a genocide. So the consequences were mind-bogglingly horrible, and it was all, not to mention, another, what, 20,000 American soldiers killed in Vietnam during the Nixon administration. So it was all in the name of a kind of global positioning that allowed, in Kissinger's view, the U.S. to do things that he he wanted and Nixon wanted to do at the expense of, you could say, millions of human lives. They knew we were going to lose. They knew we were going to lose. They knew we were going to

withdraw. We were going to sign a peace accord and withdraw. That peace accord was really very much like what could have been had in 68 when Nixon disrupted the talks just before the election. So four more years of war, four and a half more years of war, we ended up with the same piece Accords, an illusion, because it seems to be one that allows the South Vietnamese government to remain, but we knew that they were going to fall. Just let's let them fall a little later so that it doesn't look like our defeat. And I don't know how to put a number on those dead. I don't know how many died during the body. I have the numbers in front of me right now. We dropped 500,000 tons of explosives on Cambodia. That directly led to the death of about 150,000 people in Cambodia.

and Lao. But then again, that campaign plays a key role in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, which itself leads to a genocide in which millions more die. And that, of course, doesn't count the tens of thousands of people who, tens of thousands of American troops and, I should say, maybe Vietnamese fighters who died in that four-year interval between 1968, 69, and 1973. Absolutely. We have to include hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, north and south. This is to me the most, the single, most serious charge against Kissinger, and one for which I don't really see an answer. I once met him. I had, as I mentioned, that piece about half a dozen encounters with him. And one time it was at a lunch where

my wife and I were invited to someone's lunch and suddenly there's this familiar sounding voice at the other side of the room. And so we were talking. And so we were talking. I asked him, you know, what about those talks in 68 and then the decision to continue the war for all those years? And I was beginning to work on the Holbrook book. And he said Holbrook would have done exactly the same thing, that anyone understood that we couldn't just leave Vietnam. It would be impossible simply to withdraw. So instead, we began withdrawing troops slowly in a measured way while Vietnamizing the conflict

turning it over to the South Vietnamese more and more, blah, blah, blah. He had this whole analysis of why this was the only way to do it. Otherwise, terrible things would have happened. Do you buy it? No, I don't buy it for a second because, first of all, Holbrook

was trying to negotiate peace and withdrawal at that moment when Kissinger then became a kind of spy in the camp of the Paris Peace talks and passed it on to Nixon. And Holbrook said that Kissinger was devious, that he was a liar, that there was incredible indifference to human suffering. He either did nothing to alleviate it or actively made it worse. And that the decent interval, there was nothing decent about it. It was an indecent interval. So at that point, Holbrook, I think it's fair to say loath,

Kissinger, but also felt some admiration for his power and his track record and wanted at least to be able to be in the position that Kissinger had been in his Secretary of State. Let's move on to China. One of the triumphs credited to Kissinger is his opening of diplomatic relations with China under Nixon. From the perspective of 2023, I think it might be hard to grasp just how significant this moment seemed, at least to Kissinger and Nixon. in the 1970s. You know, at this point, U.S.-Chinese relations

have gone through so many chapters since 1971. We've become, we became at one point the most significant trade partners in history. China's opening, not only to the U.S.,

but to the world in terms of its exports, led to what I would call one of the greatest declines in poverty in human history, which itself must be considered one of the great macroeconomic accomplishments in human history.

And now we are in a period of either decoupling or certainly more anima, there's certainly more animosity in the relationship between the U.S. and China. So many, many chapters this history since the initial opening in the 1970s. But as a singular accomplishment, how do you assess the significance of the opening of U.S. relations between the relations between the U.S. and China? Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably the single most important diplomatic achievement in American history since World War II. I can't.

Since the creation of that post-war order of the UN and NATO and the other institutions of the post-war, nothing like it happened before or after to compare with the opening to China. And it was not Kissinger's idea. It was Nixon's idea. But Kissinger was the supremely subtle and determined implementer of the idea who seemed to nothing more than to spend hours talking to Chiu and Lai, you know, and just learning the secrets of the Chinese great men. And yeah, it was kind of unthinkable because Nixon was the prototype anti-communists. That's how he came to power and that's how he exercised it. And yet it turned out that for Nixon and

Kissinger, communism was not really the barrier. And the idea that before 1971 had been the kind of commonly held idea that there was an invincible monolithic block of communist powers that were our enemy, the Soviet Union, China, and their proxies. Well, Kissinger and Nixon understood that there had been a break between the Soviet Union and China, that it had really been going on for years and that it could be exploited. And it could be exploited both to sort of move China away from being an implacable enemy, which it had been, and also make the Soviet Union nervous enough that we would have leverage over them in what was the second phase of this diplomacy, which was detente and arms control talks. So they were related breakthroughs. They happened in a very

short period in 71, early 72. And Kissinger was acting absolutely in his element, moving pieces around on a chessboard. It is in the context of China that I want to talk about Pakistan and Bangladesh, because while you said that maybe it is Kissinger's record in Vietnam and Cambodia that is the worst stain on his record, some people mention this as the worst part of his record. So as a little bit of historical context, in 1947, the British leave India, and they divide the nation of Pakistan into two parts on either side of the north of India, that which is modern Pakistan and modern Bangladesh. So Pakistan exists like this for 20, 23 years until 1970. In 1970, in East Pakistan, there is an election. The winner of that election says he wants autonomy for East Pakistan. West Pakistan, again, this is the landmass we now consider to be, Pakistan, attacks with extreme violence and repression. At the time, the reason this is related to China is that Pakistan is an American ally.

We are using them in part to buttress our opening of China, which itself is designed to deliver a blow to the Soviet Union. So again, it's chess pieces upon chess pieces. But as a result, because we don't want to hurt our relationship, with West Pakistan, we allow them to commit all these atrocities in East Pakistan, which results in the death of thousands and thousands of people. I know that this isn't exactly your realm of expertise, but I know that you know Gary Bass, who wrote a book, The Blood Telegram, which is a deep history of this saga. How do we fold this period of Kissinger's history? How does this period of Kissinger's history, maybe I should say, fit into some of the themes that you have been

painting of his record. Well, I wish Gary Bass were here. I would simply turn it over to him like the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall, because Blood Telegram is a really remarkable piece of history. Basically, what it shows is the White House tape show Nixon and Kissinger utterly contemptuous of either the human losses in East Pakistan, soon to be Bangladesh, the warnings of their own diplomats, the American ambassador in Dhaka, or the consul, rather, because it was not independent yet, the American consul in Dhaka, who is Archer Blood, who wrote the telegram warning that there's going to be a genocide, they dismissed it. And they were even willing to break the law, as Gary Bass found out.

They were even willing to knowing that there was a, it was illegal for the U.S. to give arms to Pakistan in what became its war with India at the end of the East-West Pakistan Civil War. Pakistan in India then began to fight. And we armed Pakistan to fight India because it was our ally in the Cold War and because it was a useful conduit to Beijing in the orchestration of the opening to China. So it shows how everything was subordinated to that great game, everything,

including our siding with Pakistan in a war with India that Pakistan actually lost and was humiliated in. Nixon and Kissinger in these White House tapes are talking about India and Indira Gandhi in these really grotesque and insulting terms, calling her a bitch, calling Indians bastards, this vulgar and racist generalizing about what Indians are like and how annoying they are and what Pakistanis are like and they're also annoying, but they're kind of our annoying guys. it shows two men egging each other on to out-tuff the other, Kissinger trying to impress Nixon with his own toughness. We've come this far without talking about the Soviet Union. We obviously have to talk about the policies of the United States under Kissinger and Nixon

toward the Soviet Union. I want to begin this mini chapter in sort of a strange place. I don't know if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. You did. Two thumbs up I'm getting from George. Two thumbs up for me as well. At the very end of the movie, this is spoiler alert, and everyone should absolutely see the movie, even though it's a matter of historical record.

The last frame of the movie is very, very powerful. And, all right, now that you've all hopefully clicked out, if you haven't seen the movie, Oppenheimer remarks to Einstein in the final frames that they initially feared that the chain reaction, the atomic chain reaction from the development of the nuclear bombs, would trigger a process in the atmosphere that would ignite nitrogen and explode the world. And Oppenheimer has this realization as he imagines the future of nuclear war that in fact, even though the testing of the first nuclear weapons in Los Alamos didn't explode the world, the aftermath of the development of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the Soviet Union will, in his mind, inevitably, lead to nuclear war and destroy the world. It's a really, really powerful moment. You see in this final frames of Oppenheimer a sort of imagination by Christopher Nolan of the entire world being covered in the flame. that are push out from mushroom clouds. That never happened.

We never had nuclear war, or have not, knock on wood, in 2023, had nuclear war destroy the world. And to a certain extent, I wasn't alive in the 1950s, 1960s, but there's a part of me that wants to credit the diplomats, the 1950s, and 1960s, for keeping us from that brink. And so to a certain extent, there's a part of me that wants to assign a certain credit to people like Kissinger, who did usher in the policy of detente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, who purposely relaxed strained relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis, negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation talks and the anti-ballistic missile treaties.

I wonder if you believe that we should count Kissinger's diplomacy with the Soviet Union, like just that diet, U.S. and Soviet Union, as an unalloyed success. I don't know that anything is ever unalloyed in this domain, but I think it was a success and a really important one. And it's interesting, Derek, that Kissinger, we all know, is hated by the left. Christopher Hitchens famously wrote a book called The Trials of Henry Kissinger, in which he was convicted on many charges. But Daytona made the right hate Kissinger because they thought it was appeasement. and the opening to China as well. It was appeasement of the communist block, and we should be rolling back communism, not making our peace with communism. And so Kissinger, it's hard for some people today to remember, but Kissinger, by the time he left office, was hated by the Reagan wing of the Republican Party, which was about to take over the party. And that's one reason why Kissinger never had another job in government, because when Republicans were in power, Kissinger was no longer in favor. But I think they hated him for the wrong reason.

They should have hated him for Vietnam and Cambodia. The daytime with the Soviet Union, yes, it was, in a sense, amoral because we were no longer pushing hard on human rights because we were looking for ways to find common ground with the Soviet Union. But we weren't really getting much done on human rights anyway. and the lowering of the threshold for nuclear war, it's hard to think of anything more important. And this goes back to the basic fundamental philosophy that Kissinger brought to international relations, which was the greatest danger is disorder

and an imbalancing of great powers so that one makes a mistake and thinks we can do, anything we want, which was one reason why in the 90s, when the US was the sole superpower, Kissinger was constantly warning against various examples of US overreach, because he did not want the balance of power to be put so far out of whack that one side or the other would make a mistake and would misread the other side.

He always wanted there to be channels of communication, and a sense of we, you know, we know what you want. We're not going to give it all to you, but we're going to at least to understand your place in the world and your desires and your fears and try to accommodate them enough that we don't end up in that state of nature where we're just at war with each other all the time. So it meant that Kissinger was on close terms with a lot of. of really horrible world leaders in order to maintain order. The Middle East is a good example of that. I don't know if you want to talk about the Middle East, but that's another place where you

have to give him some credit. Yeah. In your touch on it. Yeah. Briefly, there was a surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria in 1973, known as the Yom Kippur War, October of 73. Nixon was at a very weak moment in the Watergate scandal. So really Nixon was out of action and Kissinger took over U.S. policy. And what Kissinger did was a series of shuttles between mostly Cairo and Tel Aviv, but also he went to Damascus and achieved a ceasefire and ceasefire lines. But really his longer term achievement was to bring the U.S. into the middle of the middle. least conflict, to some degree marginalize the Soviet Union, which meant that Egypt began looking to the U.S. as well as Israel for support, which allowed for there to be the basis for the Egypt

Israeli peace, which has lasted until this day. It wasn't Kissinger who actually achieved it. In fact, another book worth reading, Master of the Game by Martin Indic shows that what Kissinger wanted was not peace, but a process that was slow and incremental in order that neither side would make a mistake. He was so cautious and conservative, he did not believe that either side was ready for complete peace. But Jimmy Carter came in a much more typically American humanitarian, idealistic. We all want peace and human rights. And he actually did achieve what Kissinger didn't quite. But Kissinger laid the groundwork for the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, and that's something else that we have to say is on the plus side of the ledger in his

record. We don't have time to talk about every single chapter in Kissinger's legacy. We don't have time, for example, to talk about Chile or Greece, but I encourage people to read about those stories. I think that when we talk about Kissinger's legacy, we often focus on what happened outside the U.S., right, in Cambodia or in China. You had an interesting point in our emails before we hopped in this podcast. You said that sometimes our evaluations of Kissinger overlook how important his private sector legacy is in America. After he leaves the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, he sets up Kissinger Associates and in many ways is just as influential in the private sector as he's been in the public sector. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, he, in 1982,

I think, created his private consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which, you, you know, used all the connections he had as a government official with world leaders to give advice to businesses. And he made an enormous amount of money. He was really as much as anyone responsible for leading American business to China and making it possible for, to open up the Chinese market after Deng Xiaoping took power and to create the groundwork for what became, as you said, the most important trade relation in history. That was all to Kissinger's liking. And I don't know if he saw a downside,

because I haven't read his writing on that subject, but there were downsides. It cost the American economy a great deal of its manufacturing base. Trade created a lot of social friction and disarray that you could say led to the kind of alienation from elites. and both government and business that helped give to create Trump. Kissinger belonged to the world of the elites. And over the years of his post-government life, many decades, he just spent an enormous amount of energy trying to, in some ways,

fix his record both in government and after government, with elites by writing. books by going to conferences, by having dinners thrown in his honor, by having prizes named after him. The Kissinger Prize, which is given by the American Academy in Berlin, was given to Samantha Power in like 2009 or 10, I don't know when. And she and Kissinger actually developed a relationship, and he gave her advice, and she looked to him for wisdom. And it's kind of remarkable how flexible he was, Samantha Power, who was known then as the great champion of humanitarian intervention and human rights and foreign policy. And Henry Kissinger, for humanitarian intervention, was anathema, managed to

find each other in some way. And to what do you credit that? Is it mere charisma? Is it, is it intelligence plot charisma? Is it just a love of people? He had a lot of intelligence. He had a lot of charm. He was assiduous, and he read people extremely well. I mean, I think this is part of his success as a diplomat, was he was not really interested in societies or in ideological movements, but he was really interested in how to manipulate people in power. And he had an incredibly sensitive psychological antenna for what Sadat and Rabin, and Cho and Lai and Assad were like and what would make them move, how you would get them to do what they didn't think they wanted to do,

which is what diplomacy is all about. He just, so he, I said in a piece in the Atlantic that he had a very human inhumanity. We've talked about the inhumanity. The humanness is his ability to read people and his curiosity about them, his willingness to keep learning, and his, in some ways, his openness. When you talk to him, you don't feel as if, when I talk to him, I did not have the sense that he was sort of dispensing little gems of wisdom from Mount Olympus. He liked to talk and he liked to keep talking.

In fact, this is going to be a little embarrassing. But when I went into interview him for my whole book, at one point, at the end of the interview, I went into the restroom of his office. And suddenly at the next urinal, there's Henry Kissinger still talking to me, you know, and kind of breaking the unwritten rule that you don't talk while you're standing side by side of urinals. So he had this, yeah, he had an appetite for human beings and for human conversation that was, I suppose, for a lot of people, irresistible. And so he really was a favorite of the elite in New York and Washington. and in a lot of world capitals.

And I think part of his agenda was to make sure that he had done everything he could that the ledger on Henry Kissinger would be more favorable than unfavorable after he died. It's a well-taken point. He was charismatic, but he was strategically charismatic.

And you spoke earlier of American values. Kissinger did not have American values. He was suspicious of us. He was suspicious of us. He was suspicious of our crusades and our moral righteousness and our belief in having a mission around the world. And in democracy, he was suspicious of democracy. He didn't think that Chilean democracy should be respected because he thought the people of

Chile had made a bad choice in voting for Iende. He was a quintessential, central European realpolitik practitioner, which goes back to his heroes of the 19th century, Medernick, the Austrian statesman, Bismarck, the German unifier and leader, those were his heroes. And they were not men who believed in democracy

or in human rights. They were men who believed in power, but in how to use power in a way that did not destroy nations, but allowed them to persist. And so in a way, Kissinger, his incredible ability to charm the American establishment

is all the more remarkable, given that he was so un-American in that way. And so in some ways didn't speak the language that most American politicians have to speak in order to get into office and stay there. You don't want to psychoanalyze, but it just seems inevitable to point out that this is someone who also, like Dr. Ruth,

left Nazi Germany, saw a once proud nation fall apart at the hands of the Nazi regime, goes to the U.S. goes to Harvard and, you know, writes this dissertation on Metternich about the balance of power from the concert of Europe in 1815 to 1914. There's basically no wars in Europe aside from the Franco-Prussian war, those 10 months. And, you know, if you sort of put it together, it's this is someone who came from disorder and fell in love with the Central European figures who were masters of playing

the chessboard of Europe in order to create a balance of power that preserved order. And he tried to play that chess game himself. And it's interesting that that so often, the playing of that chess game caused him to overlook the humanitarian details. It caused him to overlook people. I think this is very much the point of your essay, that he in many ways didn't even see the individual lives that are being affected by this broader chess game. That's really –

Yeah, that's really well put, Derek. And I would say, yes, he came from Nazi Germany. The lesson he took from Nazi Germany was not the humanitarian lesson. It was not the gas chambers. It was the lesson of war and the destruction of a great country and of the countries around it. So it's in a way, he's not the refugee we would expect, but there is another kind of refugee who might end up with that worldview coming out of the same collapse that he did. Yeah, I mean, I'm both criticizing and trying to almost ventriloquise someone who is dead and not here.

But I do think that maybe if Kissinger were here, he would say something like, I care about the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you have sort of security at the very bottom and then clothes above that, at the very top of that pyramid is self-actualization. He might say, if you don't have the base of the pyramid, if you don't have security,

you can't have the top of the pyramid. You can't have self-actualization. You can't have liberal values. And maybe something like that was his philosophy. Without order, you cannot have liberalism. So I'm fighting for the bottom of the pyramid. Like, I get that as a philosophy. I can summarize it.

It's not my philosophy. I wouldn't defend it. But it does seem to be the animating sort of theory of his intellectual life. George, you and I are talking right now at a moment where I think it's easy to be nostalgic for a certain kind of American power that defined the 20th century and that Kissinger clearly epitomized. Right now, there's war in Ukraine. There's war in the Middle East. We are seeing in many ways the limitations of America's ability to get other countries to do what we want.

in your book, in the first page of your book, actually, Our Man, you write the following, quote, what is called the American century was really just a little more than half a century. The best about us was inseparable from the worst. Our feeling that we could do anything gave us the Marshall Plan and Vietnam, the peace at Dayton and the endless Afghan war. It wasn't a golden age. There is plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it. End quote. After everything that we've discussed, what is it that you miss about what you define as the American century? I wrote those words shortly after Trump came into office. So for me, the context of the end of the American century was the beginning of something new, which was the America first century,

which to me meant a century in which the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Erdogan and the other authoritarian strongmen would have more running room. They would be able to work their will in their parts of the world in a way that perhaps they had been reluctant to when they felt that we were still in the game. So I think the fact that what I'm really trying to say in that passage is do not think that you can simply sort out good and bad and say, if only we hadn't done this, we would have been good. Or if only we had done this, we would have been bad, or the two of them are in some way separable.

They're not, because it's the same arrogance and idealism that Kitsinger did not have. He did not suffer from idealism. And I would say that was both his strength in his vision of imagining and executing and opening to China that completely changed the terms of the Cold War. and it was also his weakness to the point of wickedness in his indifference to, as we've discussed, the faceless, nameless people, faceless and nameless to him who would suffer for his policies.

And as a kind of corrective to him, you could say Richard Holbrook, who was also a bit of a rail politician, nonetheless thought in terms that are more American, in terms of, that saw us as the country that won World War II and created the international order that followed and made terrible mistakes, but also was indispensable in solving some of the major problems of the world, in solving some of the really difficult problems, including the Bosnia War of the 90s, which Holbrook helped to end with the Dayton Peace Accords. So what I meant in that passage was that you have to take it all in all. And if you decide that it was just a terrible thing for us to be a great power and to be half the

Cold War and then the only superpower in the post-Cold War, you then have to be willing to lose certain things that I think of as good things, as well as washing your hands of some of the horrors of the Cold War and the post-Cold War, which are our legacy as well. George Packer, thank you very much. Thanks, Derek, I enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening. Plain English is hosted by me, Derek Thompson, and produced by Devin Manzi. Some great news for you all.

As you probably know, we are returning, have returned back to our normal schedule of two pods a week. So be on the lookout for new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like our podcast, please rate. Give us five stars. Subscribe wherever you listen. And I'll see you later.