Throughline - The Legacy of Henry Kissinger

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Depending on where you stand, Henry Kissinger is either a foreign policy mastermind or a war criminal. Some see him as a brilliant strategist who made tough but necessary decisions to advance American interests in a complex world; others point to his infamous order that American warplanes should "bomb anything that flies, on anything that moves" as evidence that he bears responsibility for the loss of countless civilian lives. But one thing both sides agree on is that few figures in the 20th century have had a more profound influence on how the U.S. conducts foreign policy.Kissinger grew up in an orthodox Jewish household in Germany, under the shadow of the Nazis' rise to power; he and his family fled to the U.S. when he was a teenager. Professor Jeremi Suri, author of "Henry Kissinger and the American Century," argues that Kissinger's experiences during the Holocaust have informed his approach to global politics throughout his career, as well as his relationship with democracy, war, and power. Today on the show, how Henry Kissinger shaped, and was shaped by, the 20th century.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. He's still really the most influential foreign policy thinker in America in a lot of ways. What is required here is a completely new order of thinking. Many would argue he used American power to overthrow governments in Chile. Crimes that he supported and helped perpetrate. Secret war in Cambodia reveal unreported mass killings. He becomes this powerful figure in the United States who never in his life runs for office.

The man who's been described as arguably the most famous and controversial diplomat of the 20th century. For the first time in history, foreign policy has become truly global and therefore truly complicated. He's on the cover of Time magazine more than any non-president in the 20th century.

A man who was one of the lead actors in a time that was nothing less than tumultuous. There are two very strongly held polarized views. These positions are about as strong and conflictual as those between Democrats and Republicans. There is one school that sees Henry Kissinger as a strategic genius, as the great statesman of the 20th century with a model for the 21st century. Henry Kissinger has been a friend of mine. Henry's been a very good friend. The other side of the story. I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. Are those who see him as a war criminal, as a proponent and defender of the

misuse of American power, and many would argue a trend toward breaking down our democracy. Because of his support for brutal dictators, brutal regimes, brutal wars, and war crimes. Human rights advocates consider Kissinger a war criminal who has escaped accountability. Everyone I would talk to, you know, someone who sits next to me in an airplane, they ask me what I'm writing about, I say I'm writing about Henry Kissinger, and they immediately tell me which of those two schools they're in. And almost no one is in between. My name is Jeremy Suri.

I'm a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ School. Jeremy also wrote a book titled Henry Kissinger and the American Century, which is all about the life and legacy of Henry Kissinger. I tried in my book and I've tried in everything I do to fall in the middle, to find the middle. I see in Kissinger a clear and compelling argument for the United States using its wealth and power in the world to protect order and hopefully democracy. At the same time, as I argue in my book, and as Henry Kissinger was not happy, I've had many interactions with him about this, I think we often get drunk on our power. We often misuse our power. We get corrupted by our own power.

And Henry Kissinger had a lot of power. Kissinger served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. But his role and legacy in American politics and diplomacy persists, even today. Kissinger celebrated his 100th birthday in May, and he still commands the respect of many of the nation's most powerful decision-makers. Among the guests at his birthday party were U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a former CIA director, and businessmen like Michael Bloomberg.

So how does an immigrant from Germany whose family escaped the Nazis wind up as one of the most powerful and influential people in American politics? A mastermind policymaker who would win the Nobel Peace Prize, but who remains, in the eyes of many, a war criminal. I'm Randabdir Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. but who remains, in the eyes of many, a war criminal. I'm Randabdir Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. Today on the show, we're going to talk about how Henry Kissinger shaped and was shaped by the 20th century. Hi, this is Lauren Scully from Chicago, Illinois.

You are listening to ThruLife. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from CBC Podcasts. Split Screen Thrill Seekers is a new six-part series that exposes how a TV show left contestants struggling to trust what's actually real. Listen now. Jeremy Suri was a 26-year-old PhD student when he started researching Henry Kissinger for what became his very first book. So my dissertation that I wrote at Yale in my first book was called Power and Protest, and it was on the 1960s. I was fascinated as a PhD student with this era that had all these

protest movements, right? We all know about the 60s, but also this movement toward detente, toward like hyper-elite policymaking. And so I wrote a book about this. He's a character in the book. When the book came out, Kissinger got a hold of it, and he read it. And then? I received an email message saying, message from Dr. Kissinger. I thought this was just one of my friends playing a prank on me, but it turned out to be from his office. He had invited me to come meet with him. So I went and met with him in his office in New York, and he pretty much chewed me out for an hour. But that tongue lashing set Jeremy up to write another book that would be all about Kissinger

and the formative experiences that shaped his perspective on the use of American power. In this book, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Jeremy puts Kissinger in the context of the post-World War II era when the U.S. emerged as a global superpower, which Jeremy argues is crucial to understanding how Kissinger developed his ideas and how he rose to power on the global political stage. Jeremy got exclusive access to meet with Kissinger about a dozen times to try and understand how this semi-mythical figure understood his own decisions and ideas. When the book came out, we did a number of events together. We did an event together at the New York Historical Society. We did an event with Condoleezza Rice at the State Department. And he said to me, he said, Jeremy, this is the best book that has been written about me, but it is still mostly wrong. Wow.

The book is called Henry Kissinger, The American Century. Can you talk a little bit about what the American century is? Because I think people will hear that term and have their own ideas about it, but how do you define it in the book? And sort of how do you place Kissinger within that century? The United States is fundamentally transformed in the 20th century, particularly the second half of the 20th century. So much so that people we revere, like Abraham Lincoln, would not recognize the country. And I say that as a good thing. Countries have to evolve, right?

Our values might endure, but who we are as a society evolves. Three things fundamentally changed the United States. First, the United States goes from being a small, moderate power in the world to being the preeminent power economically, militarily. It's hard to find any historical parallels since Rome for the amount of power the United States has after World War II. And it's a pretty sudden rise if you think about what the country was like at the beginning of the 20th century and what it is at the end. And even today, the amount of power that we possess. Second, the United States becomes incredibly

internationally diverse. We had always been a society that was filled with people coming from all sorts of places. And of course, those who had already been here, very diverse native peoples. But the volume, the scale of that in the 20th century is so extraordinary. So it's the diversity of our country, in addition to our power. And then the third thing that I think is actually most significant is that the functioning of our democracy has changed. That's the kind of crisis we're dealing with now. And one way in which the functioning of our democracy has changed is there's been all kinds of new roles created. Kissinger is at the forefront of that. Nowhere in the Constitution does it talk about a national security advisor. Nowhere does it talk about the kinds of bureaucracy and management of that power.

And so the internal institutions are fundamentally changed. The founding fathers would be astounded to see what the Pentagon is, to see that we have a unified standing military with all these tools and toys that we use around the world. And that's changed who we are as a democracy, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But that's the American century as well. You know, it's interesting, because you're describing all these very big forces that are obviously bigger than one guy. And, and so I wonder, you know, within this American century, this transformation of the country that's happening. How does Kissinger fit in? Because I think often he's credited with a big part of that transformation. And that's actually, I think, his insight for those who are interested in leadership studies. You don't have to believe he was a great statesman to believe we can learn from him. Because this is a man who clearly turned a very vulnerable,

lack of power position in the world, right? He's an immigrant. He doesn't even speak English when he comes to the US. And within a decade, he's moving into powerful circles. And within a few decades, he's running the country in many respects, right? So this is a man who understands how to use power. And I think what it is, is he sees these trends around him. He knows he's not making them, right? He's not the reason that he immigrates to the United States. But he understands these changes, and he figures out how to lean into them at certain moments in ways that will contribute to his power. I'll give a very disturbing but real example of this. As I found in my research, he is almost always working for people who have anti-Semitic attitudes. Nelson Rockefeller, who was an important patron of his in the 1960s, Richard Nixon. No one gave a single person more power over foreign policy than Nixon gave to Kissinger in putting him in that role. But you find in the record, they're always saying, often saying anti-Semitic things to him and about him. And what he does is he leans into that sometimes, not to throw up his arms and yell at the powerful patron who's doing this,

but sometimes leans into those attitudes and even contributes to them to get power for himself. Wow. So on the one hand, it's horrible because he's leaning in and in some ways reinforcing these attitudes. On the other hand, he's understanding how to use these attitudes that he's not going to change in one day. He's understanding how to use them to empower himself. And he would say he's using those attitudes to actually change the behavior of the person

with the bad attitudes to support what he sees as better policies. It's like extreme pragmatism towards a ideological goal, it sounds like. That's what- Yeah, and I think it's what he means by realism, which is another way of saying what you just said, I think he believes that the world is filled with violent, hateful elements. And what you're trying to do is contain, constrain, and shift those. But you can't pretend they're not there and you can't make them go away. Where does this come from? So if we can get into his biography a little bit.

Let's just start at the beginning. You talked a little bit about his childhood. Where is he born? What is his experience like living in Germany? And how does that kind of propel him forward? So he's born in Fürth, Germany, which is just outside of Nuremberg. This is in Bavaria. It's the Franconian area of Bavaria, as it's known. And there's a large Jewish community there. They are the descendants of cattle dealers in the area. And his father is a Jewish teacher of German culture to non-Jewish girls in particular, which is very common. Many of the Jews in Germany over generations, they go from being cattle dealers and others to actually being the people who are promoting German culture.

One historian says they are more German than the Germans themselves. And we've all seen this, right? Those who come into a society and become the champions of its culture. So Kissinger grows up in a very modest home in a kind of Jewish ghetto, but it's a home where there's a great deal of emphasis on learning, a great deal of emphasis on German culture. And it's a home that's also orthodox. This is really important. His father works outside the home in the school, but the family life is orthodox,

and they belong to the most orthodox synagogue in their community. This world is disrupted in ways that most of us cannot imagine when he's an early adolescent. Because the Nazis come to power, many of them were from Nuremberg. So he's in the suburb of the home of Nazism. He sees this. One of the Nazi newspapers, their propaganda sheets was called Der Sturmer, and it was published right near where he grew up. So he sees the violence. And in 1935, his father, under the Nuremberg laws, is forced to give up his job. And he has to go and teach Jewish children instead, which is a real insult for his father, who had been a prominent figure in the community archives, particularly the German local city archives, I found what are called the Judenkartei for Kissinger's family. So these were literally large index cards that the Nazis kept, and they kept track of where all the Jewish men were. This is how they found Jewish families. And I found them for his father, who fortunately wasn't killed, his grandfather,

uncles, and others. They literally were in a cabinet of file cards in the local archive. And I photocopied them and showed them to him. I brought them to him at one of our meetings. And he had never seen these before. He knew the facts in them, but he had never seen these before. And it's the most emotional I've ever seen him. He was still controlled, let's be clear. Henry Kissinger doesn't get emotional and fly off the handle in the way I would when seeing that.

I was probably more emotional when I saw them myself, but he was quite emotional. And it's one of the ways that I was able to get him to talk about that experience and how it mattered to him. And I think one of the takeaways is how serious that experience is and how we're still – and here, in this case, he was in his late 80s, were still grappling with it. What scholars of Jewish history have told me, and I think this is true for any group, is when you've had that kind of collective trauma, it gets buried very deep. And it influences you, but it's hard to pull it out. I mean, I've seen that with my grandparents on the Indian side who lived through the partition, right? It's the same kind of thing. And that in no way justifies anything Kissinger has done,

but I do think it helps to explain things. My takeaway was the Holocaust has never left him. It's with him. And many people who lived through the Holocaust come to very different conclusions, but that doesn't mean it hasn't influenced all of these people, and they've just processed it in different ways.

But I think it's ever-present, and in some ways, the reason this is the American century is because the United States, in a sense, becomes one of the largest inheritors of people who have lived through the Holocaust, fled, and come here. And then they become really influential people in the United States for all kinds of reasons, not just in politics, in business, in academia. Look at all the sort of Jewish emigres who lead the scientific discipline, right? They build the atomic bomb, right? And so I think Oppenheimer, the movie's going to be about that to some extent, right? So the American century becomes the repository for this deep, difficult Holocaust processing. And in 1938, right before Kristallnacht, the family comes to the United States. They had some relatives who were in New York. His grandparents, his maternal grandparents, who he was very close to, they don't leave. And they die at the hands of the Nazis. And so you

just imagine him as a young boy growing up in a society that had anti-Semitism, but seeing that anti-Semitism and separation turned to violent death within a few years. I can imagine what might have been even more kind of insulting about this rise of the Nazis is that it was like championed by the people. And so I wonder how that influenced his views on democracy and on the will of the people. Just what you said, Rand, he has a deep skepticism about what we would call populism, about what people would choose. Jumping ahead a little bit, I found in my research that even though he was surrounded in the United States by all these moments of civil rights activism, and there's no evidence he ever opposed it, there's no evidence he ever got involved. He's not someone who goes to crowds.

He's skeptical of crowds. And I think of a lot of Jews, I'm half Jewish. And it's true, right? If you're conscious of Jewish history, when mobs of people come together, it doesn't matter what they're doing, right? That's usually not good for Jews, right? It's usually not a good thing, right, for us. And so he comes away, just as you said, skeptical about mass politics, about masses of people. We should be clear, the Nazis never receive a majority of the vote in a fair election, but there are, of course, a lot of supporters. What I found in correspondence with his father that was in the archive is there were all kinds of former students who wrote to his father and said, I'm sorry, we can't come and help you. We love you. You're a wonderful teacher, but we're afraid that we'll get in trouble if we help

you. But what I think Kissinger witnessed is the passivity of human beings too, that we don't help others. We look away. We look away. And so it's not that he's anti-democratic, but that he doesn't think democracy should be based on mass politics or populism. He thinks it should be controlled by trained ethical elites. So they leave Germany in the late 30s, come to the U.S. What is that experience like? I mean, he's 15, so he's not that young, meaning that he's already lived 15 years of his life in this completely different place, different language, etc.

Where did they arrive in the U.S., and what is that experience like for him? It's very difficult. So they come to New York City, to Manhattan in 1938, and they immediately move into what was called the German Jewish ghetto in New York, Washington Heights. So north of Columbia University up near the George Washington Bridge. And it's interesting because part of my family is jewish uh but we were russian jews so we were from the lower east side i had never gone to washington heights even though i grew up in new york as a jew i'd never gone there till i did research on kissinger so it tells you how these

differences remain um now it's the part of manhattan that's the the puerto rican and dominican that's the next generation there are still if you go in that neighborhood though you'll see little old jewish ladies still with their carts um so they moved to that area and and it is a largely german-speaking german jewish area uh the most popular newspaper is not the new york times it's uh der aufbau which is a obviously german language uh newspaper uh but but the interesting thing is they're german jew Jews who have been there since the late 19th century, and they see themselves as the real German Jews. This is also common in immigrant communities. So he faces not only anti-Semitism, which is rampant in the United States, that's why the Jews are in these selected neighborhoods, but also he faces within the Jewish

community a condescension that the old German Jews have to the new German Jews. His father does not get a job for a long time. His mother, she had been from a relatively prosperous family of cattle dealers. She's the one who lost her parents in the Holocaust. She actually opens a catering firm to keep the family alive. And young Heinz, who becomes Henry, he goes and works in a brush factory. He actually had a job cleaning brushes. He went to George Washington High School. And then he began night school studying accounting on the eve of Pearl Harbor. He did not have any English before he came to the United States. He learns English after the age of 15. And that's one of the reasons he has this heavy guttural German accent, because he's learning English after the age of 15. And that's one of the reasons he has this heavy,

guttural German accent, because he's learning English so late in his life. What are some of the formative moments as he enters adulthood that start to kind of set him on this path towards being what he would become? The most important thing that happens in his life after the Holocaust and immigration is entry into the U.S. Army. And he says that himself. And, of course, thousands of Americans say this, often from immigrant backgrounds. It's the first time in his life at age 19 that he is not living in a kosher home. It's the first time he eats non-kosher food.

He's sent to South Carolina. He's also made a citizen more quickly than he would have been otherwise. But he's channeled into a new direction. He's channeled into, he's pushed into counterintelligence. Because they're Jewish, they have to be anti-Nazi. They don't worry that they would collaborate with the Nazis. And he has German language skills. And because he left Germany at 15, he also has cultural skills. He understands. And the U.S. Army is desperate in Germany to have people who speak the language, who know the country. And so he's sent back to Germany with counterintelligence, and he's responsible for working with some of the highest levels of the U.S. Army in managing the territory they move into, particularly after the Normandy

landing. And so he'll play a role in Heidelberg, Germany, of actually setting up the occupation. And so just think about that. The immigrant is back in a few years, now setting the law, ruling over the area. It's quite an extraordinary transformation. It's what opens him to the world of policy and is what gives him his first connections to elite figures. And how does he then use those connections? So he ends up at Harvard, right? How does he start to figure out how to climb? I think, first of all, he sees there's an opportunity and he's desperate, right? He's desperate because his life has been so difficult. And he's also morally committed to this. I think he sees what's happened when you don't have good leadership. He wants to be a part of that. I see that in so many immigrants of that generation. They've seen the horror of what happens when there's bad leadership and they believe they have to be part of the correction. And so he has a number of patrons within the

military, people who will literally write recommendations, open doors for him. He has experience that makes him interesting. And then he gets money from the US government. The United States creates the GI Bill. The college population in the United States almost doubles in the next decade as a consequence. And many universities, including Harvard, create special openings for veterans. They want to do this as patriotic duty. And Harvard in particular wants to show that it's not anti-Semitic, that it's not like the Nazis. Harvard had Jewish quotas in the early 20th century. It was very controversial.

So Harvard creates a special class in 1946, in the middle of the year, and Kissinger has money from the GI Bill. And that's how he gets admitted to Harvard. But when he goes to Harvard, just think about it. He's a freshman with all this experience. And so for faculty, people like William Elliott and Carl Friedrich, two political scientists who were his early mentors, he's an incredibly interesting and important student. And so he gets all this attention and becomes very

involved with things that most undergraduates wouldn't be involved in at any university. As far as you can tell, what was he like as a person? Was he charismatic? Was he nerdy? Was he someone that you would have gravitated to in a room of people? I don't think he was charismatic. I think what drew people to him was not a kind of magnetic personality at all. I think it was the knowledge and experience. I mean, imagine meeting a 23-year-old who had gone through everything we just talked about,

the experience of immigration and going into the army, then overseeing parts of the country that you had been forced to flee, and then having the ability to write about it, you know, that's pretty extraordinary. Coming up, that extraordinary student makes himself indispensable to the elites of the United States. Hi, this is Taylor from Doha Qatar, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

You know, as an aspiring academic that's about to graduate from university here, your stories really help me paint a better picture of history itself and the different narratives that are interwoven within it. Every Thursday, your episodes always make my day a lot more thoughtful. And I just want to say thank you. Take care. Hey, it's Ramteen here. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so, so much for your support. And if you aren't already a subscriber, just know that subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. And you also get special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes,

introduce you to our amazing producers, and basically tell you about how we make the show. To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. After World War II, the U.S. emerged as a global superpower, and Henry Kissinger began to wield his own power at the same time, when the country carried out what were arguably its most aggressive policies across the world,

all in the name of fighting global communism. We pick our conversation up with Professor Jeremy Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, in order to understand how Kissinger ended up playing a key role in shaping U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. He's very good at making himself useful because he's very smart. He knows a lot and he works his butt off. My grandmother would say he works his tuchus off, right? He just, he just, he outworks everyone else. And so he brings his talent and hard work and experience together. Nelson Rockefeller uses Kissinger in the fifties and sixties. He's the elite of the elite from the Rockefeller family. He uses Kissinger for everything, write speeches, advise him on policy

matters, all sorts of things, because Kissinger is really good at doing that. And when you need someone, your fixer, who can get you the information you need, get it to you fast, and get it to you accurately and effectively, Kissinger's the person to turn to. And he cultivates that skill. I've seen him do it, even in his 90s. There's almost no one I've ever met who can sit

down with a powerful business leader or political figure and in two or three paragraphs explain what's happening and give you a coherent thing to do. Kissinger will say, here is the problem and here's what you should do. And he'll put it together in a coherent, thoughtful way. That's what his memos do from the time he's in his 20s and 30s. I can see a danger in that, though, right? In that sort of like, hyper simplicity of like, consolidating and being like, this is the problem. This is the solution. I'm gonna make it very black and white for you. So walk me through how that approach of his, which is gaining him power, gaining him influence, you know, reflects in terms of policy, potentially, you know, pretty,

pretty kind of like extreme and somewhat argue dangerous ideas about how to approach foreign policy. Absolutely. I mean, the most, I think, important example of this, and one we have to learn from because I hope we don't recreate this mistake, is to oversimplify what communism and socialism and anti-capitalism are in other societies. Kissinger sees communism and related entities, related ideologies in the Cold War as versions of fascism, which he obviously hates from his experience. And many forms of communism are fascist-like, but many forms of socialist influence are not. There are many humane approaches, and the world is filled with a variety of mixes of different systems. But for Kissinger and many around him, the anti-communism, anti-fascism becomes a very simple way of trying to assess a regime and then justify the use of force against it. I think the most egregious example for which many people, I think, legitimately criticize Kissinger is Chile, where you have a government that comes into power under

Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. He is a socialist, but Allende is not someone who wants to bring the Soviet Union into South America and have another Cuban missile crisis. Not at all. But I've read the memos that Kissinger writes. He sees him as a dangerous Castro-Soviet-like figure, which is a total misreading. It's a misreading of Chilean politics. And then it justifies what are horrible actions by the U.S. government to support a military coup that for a decade at least will set Chile on a path of internal violence and suffering and oppression and much of the region. And it's exactly what you just described, Ron, that it's an oversimplification. It's not that Kissinger wanted to hurt the Chilean people, but it was a combination of ignorance and oversimplification that led us to do, I think, something that we as Americans should all be

embarrassed. It was part of our history. What role did Kissinger play in another kind of big moment, which is the Cold War moment of Vietnam, this battle? What was his perspective, his role, and what kinds of things happened because of his influence? So unlike Chile, Vietnam is not an area where Kissinger starts things off, right? It's not where he gets the war started. You can say the coup in Chile, that happens entirely under his view. And without Kissinger, that might not have happened. There would have been a Vietnam War and the United States would have been in Vietnam if there had been no Kissinger. American activity in Vietnam goes back to the end of World War II. It was never a priority of Kissinger's until the late 1960s, but he always justified the use of American force in Vietnam for reasons I think are flawed, but for reasons of what he

saw as anti-communist containment, believing this was an area where communist power was expanding. And this is what people call the domino theory. If the communists move from China into Vietnam, then they're going to move to Japan or move into Thailand or Australia. And so we need to stop them, right? But he's not making that policy. When he comes into power or begins to have influence, even with the Lyndon Johnson administration, what he's trying to do is allow the United States to still pursue containment, but to do it by mixing force with negotiation, negotiating with the Soviets and eventually the Chinese. So in office, on the one hand, he raises the use of violence. We begin to bomb much more. But Kissinger is also trying to negotiate with the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and the Chinese. He wants to pull the

United States out, but also preserve an anti-communist government. And that fails, because when we do leave, finally in 1975, the non-communist government falls and the communists take control of South Vietnam. The war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos lasted for nearly 20 years and resulted in the deaths of millions of people caught in the crossfire. American warplanes bombed swaths of lands and destroyed villages that had no relation to the fighting. American warplanes followed Kissinger's directives for a bombing campaign against, quote, anything that flies on anything that moves. Kissinger personally guided secret indiscriminate bombing over Cambodia, which led to as many as 150,000 civilian deaths. Yeah, I mean, there's something striking to me about, you know, we're talking about someone who,

you know, as a teenager, you know, left Nazi Germany where there was going to be, in the years after he left, like an amount of violence that was, you know, it's hard to wrap your head around, right? And yet so many of his policy approaches, like relied on violence. And so I'm just trying to make sense of how did he rationalize this sort of like, you know, he was calling out the violent acts of the world, as you said at the start, right? Like he was very keenly aware of them and intent on containing them. And yet that was so much of his approach to handling issues. What do you make of that? I think that's the irony that he himself sees, right?

And has actually written about this, that in a world of extreme violence, sometimes you have to use other violence to stop the worst violence. That's what he would say. So he would say that some of the violence that was used by the United States was necessary to prevent communist expansion and World War III or to prevent nuclear war. The way he would justify that in Vietnam – I'm not saying this is correct. I'm just giving you his justification, his way of thinking – is that if we had allowed the communists to quickly go into Vietnam the way Hitler had gone into Czechoslovakia in 1938, that then they would have moved further and further into Japan, into the Philippines, into Australia. And that would have brought us to the brink of another world war as happened when Hitler invaded Poland and the Soviet Union, right? And so that we're fighting them now, so we don't have to fight them later when it's worse.

Do you buy that, that he really believed that he was doing the righteous thing? Like, I just, like, how much did he have this, like, righteous North Star where he really believed he was doing the right thing? I think in general he did. But I think he also at times gets drunk with power and gets venal and becomes self-justifying and forgets that there are people on the ground. When you're sitting at the tops of power, human beings, they become numbers.

Their humanity is lost, and I do think that happens with him. So it's both of these things, right? It's both of these things. He has a moral purpose. I believe that. I think it's clear. I think it's why he's driven. But he also gets corrupted by power, as everyone does. And that's why I think having this much power in the hands of one person is dangerous. Even if it's someone who's much better than Kissinger, no one should have that kind of ideological reason, but you're kind of breaking your own ideological principles in the process. So this has been, from the time of Lincoln,

attention in American policy, in foreign policy and domestic policy. But it feels like his view of the world wins out in terms of the way America is going to approach foreign policy from there on out. And what I mean specifically by that is whatever principles we have to break, let's break them as long as we win, as long as we stay powerful,

as long as we stay in control. Do you think that his worldview that a lot of other people shared, I think, obviously, that agreed with him has kind of won out, ultimately, in American foreign policy? Unfortunately, yes. I think that's a very astute observation, Ramtan. I think that we become accustomed to winning, and winning becomes an end in and of itself. Sometimes we're winning despite our interests. Sometimes winning actually undermines our interests. We can't let the winning that we're accustomed to define who we are.

What's the purpose behind it? What's an example of that? We're like winning in a way that contradicts our interests. I think for a long time in the Middle East, that's what we've been trying to do. We've been trying to see ourselves, first, Kissinger pioneers this, in a rivalry with the Soviet Union, then in a rivalry with different Arab states, then in a rivalry with terrorist groups. And what are we trying to do? We're trying to get the most powerful actors in the region on our side. And if they're on our side, we're winning. So if the Saudis are on our side, we're winning, right? If the Israelis are on our side, we're winning. Now, I'm not saying there aren't good reasons to ally with these regimes at different times, but I've seen in the policy documents from

Kissinger's time forward, it's more like, okay, are we the most influential actor? Are we getting what we want as quickly as we want? But yet, if you look at it, we're creating more problems for ourselves down the line. We're undermining democracy, global stability, all of these other things. So I think the Middle East is sort of exhibit A for this problem. Would you say that Kissinger would agree that the ends justify the means? I think what he would say, I think what he has said, right, to the Machiavelli question, right? I think what he says is that the ends often require certain means. He wouldn't say they justify the means, because he would see that as too strong a statement, I think. He would say the ends require means. So fighting a war in Vietnam, he thinks, was necessary, just as fighting

in World War II. Bombing. The United States bombed civilian areas during World War II, right? Bombing civilian areas, he would say, was required to the end of defeating fascism. Coming up, how Kissinger's legacy lives on and how we think about democracy today. Hi, this is Dottie in Wiesbaden, Germany, originally from Kansas City. You're listening to ThruLine at NPR. in 2023 Henry Kissinger's legacy remains hotly contested he remains a figure of ongoing investigation and calls for his trial in international court have persisted well into the 21st century. So how has the myth of Henry Kissinger and his legacy lived on in American democracy? This is something Professor Jeremy Suri has thought a lot about. He traveled the world and sat down with Kissinger about a dozen times to write his book, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. We pick up our discussion with

Jeremy. Richard Nixon thought Kissinger's role was actually exaggerated in the American Century. We pick up our discussion with Jeremy. Richard Nixon thought Kissinger's role was actually exaggerated in the public view. Nixon felt he was very angry, for instance, when Kissinger wins the Nobel Peace Prize and he doesn't. Right. And so. Oh, yes. I forget he wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Right. Ironically enough. Yes. Nobel Peace Prize has a has a tricky record? You don't have to make peace to win the Peace Prize, it seems, right? No, definitely not. I think in some ways, and this comes back also to his perceived exoticism, his role is exaggerated and continues to be.

Because those who believe in what he's doing, those who, for instance, we haven't talked about this yet, think the opening to China is phenomenal and great for American business and all of these things, right? He gets exaggerated. You almost think like Henry Kissinger personally went and tore down the wall of China. Those who hate him, those who don't like what happened, and oftentimes it's policies that he alone was not responsible for, such as Vietnam, he's an easy villain. And he plays to that because his power has always been not by people getting people to vote for him, but getting people to see him as having the ability to do something others couldn't do. Again, like the magician who comes to town. He's the one, right? We're in this horrible moment in the late 60s, domestic protests, international war in Vietnam and elsewhere.

And somehow he manufactures, right, all these agreements in China with the North Vietnamese in the Middle East that seem to boost American power. And you like it. He's the man responsible. You don't like it. He's the one responsible. You don't like it, he's the one responsible too. That's super interesting also because I'm thinking about, you know, the name of your book and where we kind of started the conversation, talking about the American century.

Did the American century end, or are we still in it? I think we're still in it, but it's now not just the American century. But it's an American century still because we have so much power and influence. And that doesn't really have to take a stand on every issue in the world. You know, given the very spotty record that the U.S. has in terms of its kind of intervention around the world. And it's kind of like tabling democratic values when convenient or when it doesn't serve our interests and then pushing democratic legacy when it comes to democracy?

It's a great question. It's one I struggle with and think a lot about. There's no easy in or out answer here. When I look at the 20th century, the United States, as you said, has a very mixed record. But there are a number of cases where our involvement definitely helped the cause of democracy. In Germany, in Japan, after World War II, in India, in certain ways, after independence. But there are other ways in which our actions undermine democracy in Chile, sometimes in India in the other direction too. And so I think the lesson is, and the lesson from Kissinger's life is, first of all, we have to be clear how difficult and how flawed our approach is, that we're not perfect. We never will be, even if it was someone other than Kissinger. We have to be humble and we have to think clearly about what we're doing, but we still do need to act. And I think we overuse the military.

And the more we use the military, the less democratic the outcomes are. But I think we underutilize quite often other forms of productive influence. you know, like broader agenda that the U.S. has to like acknowledge, right, some of these things, whether it's with Kissinger or Bush and Adhok or whatever it is, right? It's like people, does it, does it impede the U.S.'s ability to do what it does on the world stage, what it's doing in Ukraine now, maybe, you know, for arguably for good there, but does it, does it essentially like make it so that politicians and rather, regardless of whether Democrat or Republican, they fall into line with this narrative or resist taking it so far as to kind of like call anyone on their team a war criminal because it threatens that global approach.

Yeah. I do think that's fair. I think it's threatening to contemporary geopolitics in two ways. First, as you say, many of these patterns of behavior patterns or behavior we still try to justify uh for good or bad reasons and so it does delegitimize uh that in the way that uh acknowledging uh that one made that that an institution made racist decisions in the past makes it harder for that institution to continue to make those same decisions today so i think there's a delegitimizing quality he he and others worry about. And I think many people look to him, as you say, to justify what they're doing today. But I think second, there's also just the fact that these are individuals in positions of power today who are making decisions. And if they legitimize any kind of war crimes trials against

American decision makers, it could point to them, even if they're doing something different from what Kissinger did, right? And so that's the challenge with war crimes. I think there are war crimes that should be pursued, but we have to be careful it doesn't just become victor's justice. That was Jeremy Suri, a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ School. Jeremy also wrote the book Henry Kissinger and the American Century. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui.

And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Sasha Crawford-Holland. Amir Marci. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Also thanks to Johannes Durge, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi.

Sho Fujiwara. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. Thank you. When your celebration of life is prepaid today, your family is protected tomorrow. Planning ahead is truly one of the best gifts you can give your family. For additional information, visit DignityMemorial.com. This message comes from Indiana University.

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