Worldmaking (61 page)

After he had completed just a year at City College, the U.S. Army drafted Kissinger in February 1943. He was a serious and hardworking youth of just nineteen years when he left Manhattan for basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina—another jolting change in environment. In Fürth and Washington Heights, Henry had been immersed in an orthodox German Jewish milieu. The Army's all-consuming demands of training—the drills, early starts, communal eating, cajoling, and bullying—ironed out the religious diversity of the draftees and ripped up the comforting routines of many recent immigrants. This had a positive dimension as well as a disorienting one, and Kissinger found that “the significant thing about the army was that it made me feel like an American … It was the first time I was not with German Jewish people. I gained confidence in the army.” Yet life in Spartanburg was not without difficulty, and he endured prejudice. After he scored exceptionally well on aptitude tests, the Army denied Kissinger the opportunity to become a doctor because of its quota on the number of Jews permitted to train as physicians. Impermanence, insecurity, and anti-Semitism—of different orders of magnitude—had been constants throughout his life: “Living as a Jew under the Nazis, then as a refugee in America, and then as a private in the Army isn't exactly an experience that builds confidence.”
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But Kissinger secured one prize through his Army service that bolstered his sense of permanence and place: at Camp Croft he became a naturalized American citizen.

While Kissinger's Judaism prevented him from becoming an Army doctor, his fluency in German and experience of life under Hitler made him a valuable commodity to the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program and given the brief of educating his fellow soldiers on the reasons why America was at war with Nazi Germany. Kissinger moved to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana, where he met Fritz Kraemer, another German émigré—though of aristocratic Prussian origin—whose job was to explain the peculiar evils of Nazism to American soldiers. Kissinger observed Kraemer in action and was impressed by the forcefulness of his speech and the quality of his insights. He wrote him a fan note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you somehow?” Kraemer met with Kissinger and was deeply impressed by his intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose, noting that Henry had “a sixth sense of musicality—historical musicality.” The two men became close; Kissinger had discovered his first mentor and won his patronage, marking an important stage in his career and intellectual development. Kraemer was deeply versed in philosophy and history—he had a bachelor's degree from the London School of Economics and doctorates from the universities of Frankfurt and Rome—and Kissinger drew all the insight he could. “He would squeeze me for my ideas the way one would squeeze a sponge,” Kraemer recalled. “He hankered for knowledge, for truth. He wanted to know everything.”
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Kraemer recommended Kissinger for assignment to Germany as a translator for the division's general. He informed his superiors that he had been thoroughly impressed by “this little Jewish refugee [who] as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything.”
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And so, making good on his promise to the Nazi customs official in 1938, Kissinger returned to Germany in November 1944 as a translator for General Alexander Bolling. He was soon after promoted to a much larger role as the administrator of Krefeld, a small city in Westphalia, where he was instrumental in restoring order. Henry was promoted again to serve as a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps, assuming control of a large district in the state of Hesse. What an empowering experience this must have been: returning to the scene of an awful crime visited upon him, his family, and millions of fellow Jews, and bringing some of its perpetrators to justice. With his keen insight into the German psyche, Kissinger was particularly effective at smoking out former Gestapo. As Jeremi Suri observes in
Henry Kissinger and the American Century
:

Decades later, Kissinger enjoyed recounting how he manipulated German habits for American purposes. In 1945 he posted signs in occupied areas requesting job applications from men with “police experience.” When an applicant arrived at Kissinger's office, “I asked him what he had been doing, and he said
Staats polizei
[state police]. I then asked him in a joking manner,
Geheim Staats Polizei
[Gestapo]? And he said yes. So I locked him up … I locked up more Gestapo than the entire rest of the U.S. Army.”
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Though highly effective at his job, Kissinger had no appetite for the coarser aspects of revenge and scolded those who crossed the line in the interview room. He was awarded the Bronze Star for distinguished service.

Kissinger abandoned his religion during this time. He met many Jews who had survived Nazi concentration camps and was at a loss to find solace in the faith in which he had been immersed. “How could a benevolent God have allowed such horrors against his worshippers?” was Kissinger's unanswered question, and that of many others beside.
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His vast energy and the self-reliance of the talented immigrant propelled his career forward while a deep pessimism about human nature cautioned him against trusting people too easily, or hewing too closely to the Wilsonian strain of thought regarding the world's perfectibility. God was dead to Kissinger, and his worldview became accordingly fatalistic, anticipating worst-case scenarios. In this regard Fritz Kraemer is insightful on Kissinger's experiences of Germany: “Kissinger is a strong man, but the Nazis were able to damage his soul … For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horrors of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse … It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”
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As his Army service in Germany approached its end, Kissinger pondered what he would do in the United States upon his return—the study of accountancy had lost all its limited appeal. Kraemer was on hand to dispense typically bracing advice to his protégé in 1947. Responding to Kissinger's complaints regarding the shallowness of his education—“I know nothing,” Henry despaired—Kraemer said, “Go to a fine college. A gentleman does not go to the College of the City of New York.”
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Kissinger followed this advice and applied to Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. His application letter read: “In order to adequately prepare myself for a literary carreer [
sic
] with political history as the main field of interest, I consider it essential to acquire a Liberal Arts education.”
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Columbia and Princeton rejected him, but Harvard—at that time making a concerted effort to recruit veterans of exceptional promise—accepted him with a scholarship attached. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man who only seven years before had been assembling shaving brushes after school to make ends meet. The Second World War gave a mighty boost to male social mobility; Henry Kissinger benefited from meritocratic principles taking deeper root in U.S. society.

*   *   *

Kissinger led a monastic life in Cambridge, working sixteen-hour days to make the most of the gilt-edged opportunity that was a Harvard education. The class of 1950 was the largest in Harvard's history, and some three-quarters of the incoming sophomores were veterans who had benefited from the GI Bill. The class was more socially than racially diverse, however. James Conant's presidency had made Harvard somewhat more accommodating to Jewish and nonwhite students, but many of the institutional slights present in Lippmann's day remained. University administrators believed that housing Jewish students separately would better suit both Jews and Gentiles. So Kissinger was housed in Harvard's oldest dormitory, Claverly Hall, where he shared accommodations with two fellow Jews. Henry kept these men at a distance, shunned extracurricular activities, and immersed himself in his courses, preparing assiduously for class. As his friend and biographer Stephen Graubard writes, “For the first time in his life, Kissinger experienced the exhilaration that came from habitual reading and writing, he became something of a recluse.”
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To relax, Kissinger set aside the assigned books and instead read novels or
The New York Times
and
The Boston Globe.
He avoided reading the editorials—“He said he had to form his own opinions,” remembered one of his roommates, “not learn those of the editors.”
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Professor William Y. Elliott performed a similar role at Harvard to Fritz Kraemer in the Army—swiftly identifying Kissinger's gifts and encouraging his ambition. A magnetic presence, Elliott did not conform to the stereotype of a Harvard professor. A native of Tennessee and all-American football player at Vanderbilt, Elliott staged cockfights in the basement of his Cambridge town house and delighted in his nickname, “Wild Bill.” More conventionally, Elliott had been a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, and from that experience drew great pleasure in teaching students of uncommon ability on an individual basis. To test Henry's mettle, he sent him off to the library with a reading list of twenty-five books, inviting him to compare Immanuel Kant's critiques of pure and practical reason. When Kissinger returned, three months later, with an outstanding paper, Elliott was bowled over. He began meeting with Kissinger frequently, lavishing attention in the Oxbridge style on his thinking and writing. Elliott later wrote to the Phi Beta Kappa selection committee that “I have not had any students in the past five years, even among the summa cum laude group, who have had the depth and philosophical insight shown by Mr. Kissinger.” Yet there was still work to be done. Elliott noted that Kissinger's “mind lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”
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Kissinger's undergraduate dissertation became something of a Harvard legend. Whereas most students narrow their topic to boost the originality of their contribution—and to be able to finish more quickly—Kissinger chose to write on “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant.” At 388 pages, the dissertation was the longest submitted in Harvard's history and led to the creation of a “Kissinger rule,” which limited subsequent students to one-third of this length. The dissertation discussed the ways Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Immanuel Kant grappled with the meaning of history, but also contained lengthy digressions on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spinoza, Goethe, Rousseau, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and others, proving to readers the breadth and ambition of Kissinger's reading.

Given that the dissertation assessed Spengler, and was written by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, it is perhaps unsurprising that a deep vein of pessimism informed the argument: “Life is suffering. Birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence. No civilization has yet been permanent … This is necessity, the fatedness of history, the dilemma of mortality … The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.”
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One of the dissertation's most important themes, however, pertained to the inadequacies of theory testing when applied to politics and international relations. Or as Kissinger phrased it, “It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality.”
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There were no “merely technical” solutions to “the dilemmas of the soul,” Kissinger cautioned, and “political scientists should cease condemning their profession for not living up to their misnomer.” Kissinger was developing a line of thought that Mahan, Lippmann, and Kennan would have cheered: politics and diplomacy are better understood and practiced as an art—requiring skill, craft, creativity, and intuition—than as a science, requiring prediction, hypothesis testing, and the application of theory. Clues to Kissinger's later inclinations thus abound. The intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick believes that insufficient respect has been accorded Kissinger's “The Meaning of History,” judging it “the most intellectually creative and sustained piece of work that he wrote, and a key exposition of his concerns.”
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If this is true, though, Kissinger hit his intellectual peak in his midtwenties.

After graduating summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1950, Kissinger was urged by Elliott to embark on doctoral work under his supervision. It took some persuasion, as Kissinger—like Kennan after his graduation—was keen to study for a graduate degree overseas, to broaden his range of experience, and then to join the Foreign Service. A major factor that convinced Kissinger to stay put was Elliott's establishment of an International Seminar at Harvard, assisted by funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the CIA. The seminar was established to fund visits by exceptionally promising academics, politicians, and journalists from across the world. Here was a way to showcase the best of America—its premier research university and a bustling city—to the world's embryonic elite. No wonder, then, that the program attracted lavish financial support. Some six hundred foreign students participated in the seminar up to 1969, including Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of France, Yigal Allon of Israel, Bülent Ecevit of Turkey, Leo Tindemans of Belgium, and Mahathir Bin Mohamad of Malaysia. American participants in the program were similarly distinguished, and included Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Herter, Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and William F. Buckley Jr. To serve as his executive director, Elliott appointed Kissinger, who leapt at the opportunity to identify and cultivate remarkable domestic and global contacts. Some scholars at Harvard disliked the manner in which Kissinger used the seminar as a vehicle to serve his career goals. The eminent game theorist and nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling accused Kissinger of exploiting the seminar “to make Henry known to great people around the world.”
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This seems unfair, however, for who could have resisted such temptation?