Objections could be raised against specific Kissinger policies, even in his own With them as to give his own assessments an aura of truth-seeking candor. Gewen cites the condemnations not so much to engage Many of Kissinger’s and Nixon’s bloody maneuvers-inĬambodia, in Vietnam-weren’t as necessary or inevitable as their admirers andĪpologists assert. Kissinger’s energetic complicity in the Pakistani massacres of Bengalis. Passing, book-length indictments of Kissinger made by Christopher HitchensĪnd Seymour Hersh. Of the most substantial charges only very briefly on his way to rebutting or mitigating them.

Serious, well-informed people have condemned Kissinger’s work as immoral and Unknowns” that bedevil all grand strategists. These omissions and concessions might matter less if they did not fit soĬomfortably into a sustained pattern of excuse-making for Realpolitik at the New York Times Book Review-an institution with far more power than any individual biographer Necessary costs of braving what Donald Rumsfeld memorably called the “unknown Inevitability of tragedy helps them to excuse their blunders and outrages as Of their own dark omniscience, unappreciated by the rest of us. “grim vantage point” perversely reassuring because it reinforces presumptions Say is that some high policymakers have found Morgenthau’s and Kissinger’s His mentor and remained his friend even when they disagreed strongly about the Years older than Kissinger and a deeply principled, if darkly pessimistic,Ĭonservative political philosopher and foreign-policy remonstrant who became

Whom Gewen portrays at length, was the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, 19 Whom ever wrote or spoke publicly in his favor. Intellectuals Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, neither of Only a relativelyįew intellectuals and political actors among them wouldĮmbrace Kissingerian-style Realpolitik in its tragic fullness,īut Gewen strains to link Kissinger with the tragedy-minded émigré public To America, as did thousands of other Jews, shaken by the collapse of democracyĪnd high culture and fearing for their lives. In 1938, the 15-year-old Kissinger and his family escaped Republic in the 1920s and ’ 30s, when its democratic institutions were being Acquired his “dim view of humanity” while growing up in the Weimar

New book henry kissinger