America's Metternich

By JOHN JUDIS John Judis, a contributing editor to the New Republic, is the author of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century.

TITLE: KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY

AUTHOR: WALTER ISAACSON

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 893 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: An engrossing critical portrait of the former Secretary of State deftly analyzes the impact of the man's flaws on U.S. policy.

When Henry Kissinger returned to Germany in 1945 as a U.S. Army sergeant, he discovered a friend from Furth who had survived the concentration camps. He watched over him during his recovery, and when he left to live with an aunt in the U.S., Kissinger tried to prepare her. The survivors, he wrote, "had seen man from the most evil side. Who can blame them for being suspicious?"

Kissinger denied that the Nazi holocaust, which forced him and his family to flee to the U.S., and which claimed many of his relatives, had an impact on his thinking. He once told a reporter that his childhood in Furth "seems to have passed without leaving any lasting impressions."

But as Walter Isaacson's biography reveals, Kissinger's brush with evil lay at the heart of his "gnawing insecurity" as a man and his rejection of ideology and moralism as a statesman. Kissinger's life was a consuming quest for respect and esteem, while his diplomacy was an attempt to restore the balance of power among nations that prevailed before Nazi and Soviet revolutions.

Drawing upon extensive interviews with Kissinger and with his colleagues, friends and enemies, Isaacson's book is the most complete record yet of the former Secretary of State's life and foreign policy. It is filled with spicy revelations about Nixon and Kissinger's tortured relationship: Nixon, we learn, believed Kissinger was mentally unbalanced and at one point in 1971 considered firing him, while Kissinger referred to Nixon behind his back as "our drunken friend" and the "meatball mind." Isaacson also details Kissinger's passionate distrust of even his closest aides, which led to his wiretapping them and helped lay the foundation, Isaacson argues, for the Watergate scandal. But more important, Kissinger also contains the most credible account of Nixon and Kissinger's inability to disengage from the Vietnam War and the collapse of Kissinger's detente strategy in 1975.

Isaacson, an assistant managing editor of TIME, credits Kissinger and Nixon with transforming America's understanding of the world. Instead of seeing the U.S. as engaged in a struggle against an evil monolith, world communism, Nixon and Kissinger viewed the Soviet Union and China as traditional nations driven by competing interests; they designed U.S. foreign policy to exploit that competition in order to create a new, stable balance of power. It was, Isaacson writes, "a triumph of hard-edged realism worthy of a Metternich."

Isaacson faults the two men, however, for their indifference to "the moral values that are the true source of ((America's)) global influence." He reveals how Nixon extended the Vietnam War for six months solely because he believed a "hawkish image" would benefit his 1972 election campaign, and he portrays Kissinger as having acquired a coroner's callousness toward the victims of geopolitics. According to Isaacson, Kissinger told Gerald Ford's press secretary on the eve of Saigon's fall in 1975, "Why don't these people die fast? The worst thing that could happen is for them to linger on."

Isaacson attributes the collapse of detente and the beginning of a decade of arms buildup to the political backlash that occurred because of Kissinger's indifference to human rights and obsessive secretiveness, but he also puts considerable blame on Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson and his aide Richard Perle, who later joined the Reagan Administration. In 1974 Jackson and Perle, who were opposed to detente, held the treaty granting the Soviet Union most-favored nation trading status hostage to Soviet agreement to allow expanded Jewish emigration. The Soviets retaliated by shutting off emigration and also, as Isaacson argues, by giving the green light to North Vietnam to make the final push toward Saigon.

Isaacson's judgments are generally sound, but like other Nixon and Kissinger biographers he is driven to take sides between the two men. He compares Kissinger with Metternich and Nixon with the wily diplomat's slow-witted superior, Austrian Emperor Francis I, but it was Nixon who persuaded Kissinger to encourage West Germany's overtures to East Germany and who initiated the opening to China. Clearly the two men had similar conceptual strengths and personal weaknesses.

Isaacson's book is brilliant journalism, but he doesn't make us see and feel the drama of events through Kissinger's eyes. Except for the occasional tantrum, Kissinger disappears behind Isaacson's analysis of controversial policy decisions. But this is now the definitive account of Kissinger and one of a handful of books that should be read by anyone concerned with the Nixon era and American foreign policy.