Being Henry Kissinger

Jeremi Suri burst onto the diplomatic history scene only a few years ago, with the publication of his first book, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Along with being very well written and based on multilingual research in several countries, the book was startlingly original in its argument. Suri argued that détente was the result not simply of international balance of power issues; he showed convincingly that it also grew out of domestic considerations being raised by powerful social movements around the globe.¹ Having done his doctoral work at Yale under John Gaddis, Suri demonstrated an ability to combine the “traditional” diplomatic history for which Gaddis is well known with new ideas generated by the cultural turn. Over the past decade, as diplomatic historians debated with one another about the state of the field and the place of social and cultural history in it, Suri transcended those arguments by demonstrating that sociocultural analysis, properly applied, could artfully complement more traditional approaches without threatening to supplant them.

And so it was that scholars interested in international relations, the history of American foreign relations, and recent United States history have eagerly awaited Suri’s latest work, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. As Power and Protest demonstrated, Suri has the unique ability to seek out events and figures whose historical judgments have already seemingly been rendered, and to recast them in a different light. In this regard, unsurprisingly, this book does not disappoint. Suri’s book is indeed a unique and sure to be controversial take on a unique and controversial figure.

Unlike most of the previous biographical takes on Kissinger, Suri sets out not to judge, praise, or bury Kissinger, but to contextualize him. His book is not a “traditional biography,” but rather “a narrative of global change, a study of how social and political transformations across multiple societies created our contemporary world” (p. 4). Suri describes these transformations by charting Kissinger’s rise—from German Jewish immigrant to Cold War intellectual to elder statesman—focusing much more on the times and the worlds Kissinger negotiated than on the decisions made by himself and those he advised. As Suri puts it, “I focus not on what Kissinger did, but on why he did it.” Previous works on Kissinger, he claims, judged their subject in ways that were “superficial,” easily written with the benefit of hindsight (p. 5). “Of course,” Suri stipulates, the “brutalities committed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and Angola during Kissinger’s time in office deserve condemnation,” but judging Kissinger to be “evil,” or a war criminal, as previous studies have, is for Suri “intellectually bankrupt.” “Good men made policy during the Cold War,” Suri writes, “and Henry Kissinger was one of them” (pp. 6–7). The Kissinger Suri constructs is a brilliant and innovative thinker and a committed, if flawed, patriot, guided by moral and intellectual principles even when his decisions produce unfortunate results.

The heart of Suri’s argument, however, and his most original contribution to the already vast literature on the topic, revolves around Kissinger’s Jewish identity. Few biographers of Kissinger have paid much attention to this aspect of Kissinger’s life, aside from cursory descriptions of his upbringing and relevant asides during discussions of Kissinger’s involvement with Middle East politics. For Suri, Kissinger’s Jewishness is central not only to understanding the man himself, but the worlds in which he lived. This framework leads Suri to place emphases on aspects of Kissinger’s life and career that previous works have overlooked or ignored altogether. Suri spends a great deal of time describing Kissinger’s career prior to his time in the White House, and only the final one and a half chapters focus on his time as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. His chapters thus trace a familiar trajectory, but alter our understanding of Kissinger on their journey. The first two chapters trace Kissinger’s youth in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his journey...