Worldmaking (62 page)

Kissinger was based in Harvard's government department but he continued to shun political science methods as inadequate to the task of drawing insight from the disordered world of international relations. As his doctoral cohort focused intently on U.S. Cold War strategy, identifying and testing the theories that best fitted their topics and emerging worldviews, Kissinger instead chose to write on the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822,” Kissinger studied the way Napoleon's adversaries fashioned a stable and enduring structure of peace (by European standards) at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In Kissinger's telling, Metternich of Austria had the star turn. Metternich was subtle and devious, and he eschewed morality as a guide to diplomatic action. It was through manipulating the balance of power in Europe that Metternich was able to create stability and a concert of mutual interests—without recklessly needling the defeated France—sufficient to sustain a commerce-facilitating peace through the nineteenth century in which all of Europe's constituent nation-states were invested. Kissinger's descriptions of Metternich were vivid and subconsciously autobiographical:

Napoleon said of him that he confused policy with intrigue … With his undeniable charm and grace, subtly and aloofly conducting his diplomacy with the circuitousness which is a symbol of certainty … He excelled at manipulation, not construction. Trained in the school of eighteenth-century cabinet diplomacy, he preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack, while his rationalism frequently made him mistake a well-phrased manifesto for an accomplished action.

Walter Isaacson describes the dissertation as, “at its core, a tribute to Metternich's mastery of complex diplomacy and his ability to play a game of sophisticated linkage among different negotiations.”
36

This paean to Metternich and nineteenth-century balance-of-power diplomacy certainly caught Kissinger's fellow students by surprise. One wondered aloud if Kissinger had heard of the atomic bomb; another suggested a transfer to the history department. As his biographer Walter Isaacson observes, “Kissinger rebutted coldly. Hiroshima had not created a new world; it merely showed that man had yet to learn history's lessons about shaping a stable balance of power. So it made sense to explore the Congress of Vienna, one of the few successful peace conferences of the modern era.”
37
The insights contained in “A World Restored” truly informed the policy career that followed. But Kissinger also penned his own elegy in the concluding chapter of the dissertation: “A statesman who too far outruns the experience of his people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus, however wise his policies.”
38
Cold War America's transparent, idealistic political context was vastly different from the closed arena in which Castlereagh and Metternich had plied their trade. Kissinger understood this only too well:

This book has dealt with conservative statesmen of countries with traditional social structures, of societies with sufficient cohesion so that policy could be conducted with the certainty conferred by the conviction that domestic disputes were essentially technical and confined to achieving an agreed goal. This enabled Metternich to pursue a policy of “collaboration” between 1809 and 1812 without being accused of treason and Castlereagh to negotiate with Napoleon without being charged with “selling his country.”
39

Twenty years later, Paul Nitze accused Kissinger of committing these very same crimes.

*   *   *

Though Elliott regarded Kissinger's thesis as first-rate, some of his colleagues worried about its shallow archival base, heavy reliance on secondary sources, and the sweep and generality of his conclusions—the same criticisms directed at Alfred Mahan's
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
. For this reason and others, Kissinger did not secure tenure at Harvard in the years after completing his doctorate. While gaining tenure at Harvard was a Herculean task for anyone, Kissinger was disappointed nonetheless. Part of the problem was the sheer number of high-quality Ph.D.s vying for a permanent position at the same time, an imposing list that included Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Stanley Hoffmann. But many at Harvard also detected in Kissinger a variety of unendearing traits: transparent ambition and the haughtiness and obsequiousness that sustained it. A significant problem was that Harvard—white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant to its very core—was not a conducive environment for Jews to prosper. McGeorge Bundy, whose parents' families were both listed in the
Social Register
, was made dean of Harvard College in 1953. Bundy worked hard to reform Harvard on meritocratic lines. But Kissinger's relationship with him was strained from the beginning, and he suspected prejudice played a part. In his 1979 memoir, Kissinger wrote that Bundy “tended to treat me with the combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively intense personal style.”
40
Bundy, in fairness, actually deployed a different ethnic stereotype when criticizing Kissinger; he sensed a “certain Germanic cast of temperament which makes him not always an easy colleague.”
41
Too Jewish
and
too German—here was a cruel twist of fate.

In 1955, Kissinger published an article in
Foreign Affairs
criticizing Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation. In a similar vein to Paul Nitze, Kissinger lambasted the strategy for being recklessly all-or-nothing. The gap between waging nuclear war and doing nothing was dangerously capacious. This would invite Sino-Soviet adventurism in the developing world, over which Moscow and Beijing knew Washington was unlikely to risk World War III.
42
The article was Kissinger's first foray into the contemporary foreign-policy debates and it raised his profile considerably. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the long-standing editor of
Foreign Affairs
, invited Kissinger to direct a new Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. Kissinger was thrilled to accept the job, which provided a wonderful entrée into the American foreign-policy establishment. It was quite an accolade for an untenured thirty-one-year-old instructor at Harvard.

The first meeting of the study group took place on May 4, 1955, and witnessed a testy exchange between Kissinger and Nitze, whose common concern about Eisenhower's foreign policies appeared to unite them. In reference to the demarcation line between conventional and nuclear weapons, Nitze observed that “while the services still have a conventional ability of high order, some of their leaders seem to feel that non-nuclear methods may not be adequate to the tasks which have been outlined for the services to perform.” To fill the gap between the most powerful conventional bomb and the least powerful atomic one, Nitze suggested that low-yield tactical nuclear weapons could be developed to serve an important battlefield function. Kissinger was unconvinced by the merits of Nitze's proposal, observing that “once a war becomes nuclear it is much harder to set any effective limits.”
43
Nitze left the meeting with a distinctly bad impression, and relations would deteriorate from there.

The primary cause of their antagonism was Kissinger's conversion to the merits of tactical nuclear weapons and the successful book he wrote based on the study group's findings. On August 17, 1957, Kissinger wrote to Hamilton Fish Armstrong that “in a war among nuclear powers I have come to the conclusion—and this represents a big change in my own thinking—that limited nuclear war may actually prove to be a more stable situation than conventional war: thus, if we are concerned with avoiding all-out war, limited nuclear war might be the most effective strategy.”
44
Kissinger published
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
that same year. The book took square aim at Eisenhower's massive retaliation, advocated more flexible means of response to Sino-Soviet adventurism, and urged defense planners to devote more time to gaming scenarios in which low-yield nuclear weapons played a role. Kissinger was not exactly urging everyone to stop worrying and love the bomb—though he soon after earned the nickname “Dr. Strangelove East,” sharing the title with Stanford-based Edward Teller—but rather that the weapon should be normalized and rendered usable, in a similar fashion to certain hawkish Democrats.
45
But rather than showering praise on Kissinger—a brother in nuclear arms—Nitze savaged the book.

In a long review in
The Reporter
, Nitze assailed Kissinger for misunderstanding weapons types, miscalculating blast effects, and engaging in vague generalizations that did not stand up to scrutiny. He even deployed the criticism that Kissinger had used against him the previous year, chiding Kissinger for failing to appreciate that waging “limited” nuclear war was incredibly challenging and dangerous. “If the limitations are really to stand up under the immense pressures of even a ‘little war,'” Nitze wrote, “it would seem something more is required than a Rube Goldberg chart of arbitrary limitations.”
46
He found little of merit in Kissinger's book, asserting that “I read the book with complete distaste. I felt that Henry had not really understood the discussion, he hadn't been in this field. He didn't understand thoroughly what we were talking about. The argumentation in the book was puerile and fallacious in many of its aspects.”
47
Yet even the combative Nitze was surprised when Kissinger threatened to sue him for libel.

While vacationing in Maine, Nitze received a call from Philip Horton, the editor of
The Reporter
, who worriedly asked him if he was absolutely sure that his facts were correct. When Nitze said yes and asked why, Horton replied that Kissinger and the Council on Foreign Relations had threatened
The Reporter
with a libel suit. So Nitze took another look at the review, deleted a section that accused Kissinger of being contemptuous of democracy—in that the only historical figures Kissinger praised were Napoleon, Mao, and Stalin—and sent it back to Norton. The review was published, Kissinger remained silent, and the CFR's lawyers stood down. A few months later, Kissinger spotted Nitze in Rome at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group—the secretive annual meeting of Western Europe's and North America's political and business elite—and told him what had happened: “Concerning that review you wrote of my book,” said Kissinger, “I made a deal with
The Reporter
that they could go ahead and publish it but I would be entitled to publish a rebuttal of any length. For the last couple of months I have been working, off and on, on that rebuttal. And you know what? I got to page 147 of my rebuttal and decided that if the rebuttal took that many pages there must be something wrong!”
48
Kissinger had discovered the self-deprecating humor that would serve him so well in later years.

Nitze's hostility toward Kissinger's
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
was informed by many factors, one of which was simple jealousy. One reviewer observed cattily, “I don't know if Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing his book is a great reader.”
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But this was a rare note of criticism. Reviewing the book for
The Washington Post
, Chalmers Roberts hailed it as “the most important book of 1957, perhaps even of the past several years.”
50
Writing in
The New York Times Book Review
, Edward Teller wrote, “In a limited nuclear war, as in any limited war, it is possible to avoid big-scale conflict if our aims remain moderate and our diplomacy skillful.”
51
The Christian Realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr endorsed Kissinger's central argument in
Christianity and Crisis
: “No book in recent years promises to be so influential in recasting traditional thinking about war and peace in a nuclear age. We must be ready to fight limited wars in terms of our objectives and to win them with appropriate weapons. This circumspect and wise analysis of possibilities makes more sense than anything that has come to our notice in recent times.”
52

The book stayed on the bestseller list for fourteen weeks and sold a remarkable seventy thousand copies in hardback. Vice President Richard Nixon was photographed carrying a copy and President Eisenhower ordered that a twenty-four-page synopsis of the book be prepared and distributed to members of his administration. The combination of a highly technical subject matter and leaden prose made the book an unlikely runaway success. Kissinger recognized this, observing that “I am sure that it is the most unread best-seller since Toynbee.” Nitze found the book's success hard to accept, and Kissinger knew why: “Nitze wanted to do some work on the topic and maybe write a book of his own. He thought I should help him. I didn't want to be a research assistant to Nitze. It got very personal. He should not have reviewed the book.”
53

Regardless,
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
won Kissinger a national and an international reputation as an important foreign-policy thinker. Though he finally secured tenure at Harvard in 1959, Kissinger had no desire to live the contemplative life in a gilded Cambridge cage. He wanted to work for government. In 1959, he wrote a long essay in
The Reporter
on “The Policymaker and the Intellectual.” It was a thoughtful piece that made some important cautionary points. For example, Kissinger observed that “intellectuals with a reputation soon find themselves so burdened that their pace of life hardly differs from that of the executives whom they advise … In his desire to be helpful, the intellectual is too frequently compelled to sacrifice what should be his greatest contribution to society: his creativity.” He also cautioned against the impossibility of achieving policy certainty: