What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Jeremi Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.

Drawing on research in more than six countries in addition to extensive interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissinger's ideas and power and explains why he pursued the policies he did. Kissinger's German-Jewish background, fears of democratic weakness, belief in the primacy of the relationship between the United States and Europe, and faith in the indispensable role America plays in the world shaped his career and his foreign policy. Suri shows how Kissinger's early years in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his experiences in the U.S. Army and at Harvard University, and his relationships with powerful patrons--including Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon--shed new light on the policymaker.

Kissinger's career was a product of the global changes that made the American Century. He remains influential because his ideas are rooted so deeply in dominant assumptions about the world. In treating Kissinger fairly and critically as a historical figure, without polemical judgments, Suri provides critical context for this important figure. He illuminates the legacies of Kissinger's policies for the United States in the twenty-first century.

"Perhaps because of the pungently Nixonian odor of the Bush White House — the patriotism politics, the 'l'etat, c'est moi' declarations, the war — this season has delivered a bounty of books about the men of Watergate. The current climate has vitalized anxieties about the imperial presidency, drawing fresh scrutiny to the Nixon years from such eminent writers as Robert Dallek, Elizabeth Drew,..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Margaret MacMillan, James Reston Jr., and Jules Witcover — not to mention a Nixon biography from the scandal-plagued tycoon Conrad Black and the Broadway drama 'Nixon/Frost.'

Joining this lengthening queue is Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, with a useful, idiosyncratic study, 'Henry Kissinger and the American Century.' Suri isn't trying to compete — for audience or authoritativeness — with Dallek's 'Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power' or MacMillan's 'Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World,' which combine scholarly rigor with popular appeal. Rather, he's gambling that less can be more. Suri's 'Kissinger' is an academic rumination on the cerebral Harvard professor-turned-showboating national security adviser that, while intentionally narrow in scope, is bold in its reach.

With his gravelly Germanic mumble, horn-rimmed glasses, cold-blooded espousal of realpolitik, and a head that Oriana Fallaci likened to that of a sheep, Kissinger has become a most improbable American icon. Like his equally complex and controversial benefactor, Richard Nixon, he has generated reams of chitchat, psychobabble and lore, from his 383-page undergraduate thesis to his rumored liaisons with starlets. (One favorite tale: when thanked by an admirer for 'saving the world,' Kissinger replied: 'You're welcome.') If only for his Strangelovean presence in American culture, he warrants explication.

Suri comes at Kissinger in two ways. In the book's first part, he explores Kissinger's formative experiences in their bi-national context — the Bavarian Jew living under the Nazis, the immigrant in New York's Washington Heights, the army administrator returning to postwar Germany. In each trying situation, Kissinger learned to leverage his status as an outsider into influence — a practice that soon became a Kissingerian trademark. In the book's second part, Suri puts forth a close reading of Kissinger's scholarship, finding in it elaborations of the distrust of popular passions first instilled in interwar Germany. In the two final chapters he highlights these traits within Nixon's international policies.

Some readers, it should be warned, may bristle at the author's undisguised admiration for his subject, particularly the words 'brilliant,' 'genius' and 'revolutionary,' which pepper the prose. And Suri surprisingly omits discussion of Kissinger's well-known role in the original sin of Watergate — the illegal wiretapping of journalists and White House aides — and his alleged perjury in hushing it up.

By and large, however, Suri adopts the stance not of a partisan but of a sedate academic. History, after all, while not eschewing normative judgments altogether, calls for understanding more than moralizing — for not just adjudicating the debates over Nixon's continuation of the Vietnam War and detente, but also for explaining the meaning of those debates. If the book doesn't damn Kissinger for the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam or the 1973 coup against Chile's Salvador Allende, it does try to show why he favored those actions.

The roots of Kissinger's ideas matter because for all his failures of policy and morality, he still elicits purring admiration from a certain insider set. The insiders love Henry because in foreign affairs, despite the proven importance of personal diplomacy, Americans crave overarching visions and 'grand strategies' from which policy decisions are said to naturally flow. Kissinger managed to associate the age-old doctrine of realpolitik with his own person.

Of course, policymakers don't implement pure ideas. Individuals must interpret doctrine in light of new situations and through the filters of their own habits of mind. In Kissinger's case, his realism was animated by a cynicism so virulent that it ultimately devoured itself: Whereas more principled realists such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau opposed the Vietnam War from early on, Kissinger (following Nixon's direction) suppressed hard-headed analyses warning that the conflict was unwinnable, preferring to chase the chimeras of credibility and reputation. More recently, Kissinger's covert advice to Bush to mimic Nixon's Vietnam course by standing fast in Iraq — in opposition to realist perspectives — suggests that a hunger for influence may again have trumped the logical conclusions of his own nominal worldview.

The underlying problem is that Kissinger never admitted a fatal contradiction in his peculiar brand of realism. As Suri notes, Kissinger was so disdainful of democratic accountability that he came to think that effective statecraft 'depended on an almost mythical grand master' — a philosopher-king, a professor in a Superman uniform — whose brilliance and personality could hold it all together. Regarding his own era, Kissinger left no doubt about whom he considered that grand master to be.

In describing the legacy he wished to leave, Kissinger once said that he wanted to erect a lasting international framework that would reflect not his own preferences but the basic interests of the United States. Yet, ironically, his grand scheme required that it all rest on his personal touch.

As the years pass, the case for Kissinger's greatness becomes increasingly hard to sustain. His academic reputation has long since been deflated. Most scholars now agree that Nixon conceived and directed his own policy (except when incapacitated by Watergate), with Kissinger functioning as his agent. Even the perennial accusations of war crimes against Henry sound like overwrought sloganeering — too lofty a charge to level at a mere deputy.

Kissinger is, in the end, a smart man — not a genius, not even unusually brilliant — whose lot it was to serve a president whose mania for acclaim, dreams of grandeur and taste for secrecy and deceit matched his own. In one sense, hitching his star to Nixon's was unfortunate for Kissinger, because the shame of Nixon will always be his shame too. But in another sense it was lucky, because in the Cold War's last years Nixon unleashed him to pursue their shared ambitions on the world stage, not without some benefit. When Nixon fell, Kissinger remained standing, poised with a sly smile to gather the credit.

David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, is the author of 'Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image' and numerous books and articles about Nixon and Kissinger.

" Reviewed by Martin KettleCarlos LozadaGuy VanderhaegheJordana HornJohn McQuaidRobert PinskyJonathan YardleyDavid Greenberg, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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This is a readable and provocative book that successfully explores the formation of its subject's worldview and rise to power. Suri is at his best when demonstrating the roots of Kissinger's distrust of mass democratic politics, his obsession with strong leaders, his emphasis on the limits of American power and his disdain for the "insular self-righteousness" and "utopianism" of reformers "advocating a vision of global democracy."...[A] timely book.

Offer[s] some fresh glimpses of [Kissinger's] motives and personality on display in high office.

Henry Kissinger is arguably the most intriguing and countercultural global political figure of the 20th century...Suri's contribution to Kissinger scholarship is in the precision with which he delineates the influences that shaped Kissinger's world view. Focusing on the concept of Bildung, or inner cultivation that allows the individual to progress toward enlightenment, Suri outlines how Kissinger's intellectual development was informed by his appreciation of such transcendent leaders as Klemens von Metternich, Otto von Bismarck and Winston Churchill.

This remarkable book is far more than a biography of Henry Kissinger. By probing Kissinger's personal background and intellectual formation as well as his often cunning and frequently controversial statecraft, Jeremi Suri brilliantly illuminates both the character of Kissinger the man and the nature of the turbulent and tension-racked age in which he lived and did so much--for better or worse--to shape.

The resulting book, refreshingly short compared with the thousands of pages devoted to the man--most of which he has written himself--is both unusual and fascinating...Suri is not interested in whom Kissinger met with as national security advisor (from 1969 to 1973) or secretary of state (1973 to 1977), when he met them or even the minute details of what was discussed. In fact, he spends few pages on Kissinger's actual time in office. What he wants to get to the bottom of is why Kissinger is Kissinger, or, as he puts it, "I focus not on what Kissinger did, but on why he did it." Suri also tries to put the man in context, explain how the demands of the Cold War world facilitated the rise of such an outsider to American power...Given how hard Kissinger has tried to obscure his origins and make himself and his ideas seem exceptional, it's a little jarring to realize how much he is simply the result of historical circumstances that shaped not only him but millions of others of his generation, as well...One can probably do no better than Suri's portrait of Kissinger's mind.

This book is different from every other book about Henry Kissinger. In tracing the influences on Kissinger, from his life as a boy in Germany to his rise as one of the most powerful diplomats in the world, Suri's book is critical to our understanding of how and why Kissinger acquired his positions.

Suri has provided a brilliant and balanced portrait of Henry Kissinger. Shaped by his childhood in Germany, his adolescence in New York, and his wartime experiences in the army, Kissinger was forever the outsider, indelibly influenced by his Jewishness, even as he became the consummate insider. Suri incisively analyzes the qualities that made Kissinger so attractive to patrons like Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, but also skillfully examines the flaws that will forever tarnish Kissinger's legacy.

Nobody will ever accuse Jeremi Suri of lacking style or insight. His study of Henry Kissinger's personality and place in history offers piercing originality--so much so that laying down Dallek for Suri feels rather like that moment in The Prince and the Showgirlwhen Laurence Olivier, after telling all and sundry that they have too little love in their life, meets his ex-mistress...and realizes that she has too much.

Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the 20th century. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissingers ideas and explains why he pursued the policies he did.

Jeremi Suriis Professor of History at the <>University of Wisconsin, Madison.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Making of the American Century

1. Democracy and Its Discontents

2. Transatlantic Ties

3. The Cold War University

4. A Strategy of Limits

5. A Statesman's Revolution

6. From Germany to Jerusalem

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index