FT.com | People | Lunch

Page 1 of 4

STAY ON TOP OF
GLOBAL NEWS

Subscribe now

get it v

Make FT.com your homepage

Monday Jan 21 2002 All tim

FT.com

FINANCIAL TIMES

TotalSearch

All sources

Need more business information? Ask our research team - click here

Global | UK | US

News

Markets

Industries

Co

FT.com > People > Lunch

PEOPLE | LUNCH WITH THE FT

Lunch with the FT

18 Jan 2002

Henry Kissinger, Senior
statesman

By Robert Thomson

The heavy furniture, the wood panelling and the formality of the Brook Club are straight from a cultural catalogue with listings for "stuffy English establishment" or "ersatz elite". Step inside and meritocratic Manhattan of the early 21st century is somehow transformed into an imagined

London of the late 19th century, complete with hierarchy, designer gloominess and meaningless motto ("I go on forever").

That motto would make more sense as a slogan for Henry Kissinger, a member of the Brook Club, and still the personification of great power diplomacy.

To capture a little of the flavour of Nixon, Mao and monosodium glutamate, we had tried to book at a favourite Chinese restaurant, but the private rooms were full and, as Mao came to realise, eating with the masses is less interesting than telling them what to do.

Mao is lying in state in Beijing and only God knows where Nixon is, but Kissinger is still Kissinger, with the familiar presence, physique ("I lost 25 pounds, but gained 10 back") and voice, whose guttural grandeur is either the sound of a significant mind in motion or the symbol of a haughty hegemony.

Having written a generally favourable review of his last work, *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?*, I wondered self-consciously whether this had prompted him to agree to lunch. Kissinger, however, could only vaguely recall the piece and observed with deft, dry understatement that "I tend to remember grievances" more than compliments.

Apart from the stuffiness, one other awkwardness at the Brook Club is that business is not meant to be conducted at the lunch table, giving rise to the almost existential question: is interviewing Henry Kissinger conducting business? So as not to break the rules, the tape recorder was carefully hidden behind a bread roll and the notepad was tucked under the table.

With the diplomatic arts back in fashion, Kissinger's thoughts are in demand

Share p

Enter Sy

Select C

MY PORT

Manage

companies

Register

Sign up

Edit your

Useful t

Book your

Get current

Get map

Get weather

Free Anti

Request

Buy
your

more in focus

Patricia R

Mike Ben

Yves Sair

Shri Atal

Donald C

Hank Gre

Howard L

Osama bi

Domingo

Peter Jac

John Arm

http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3DQSHFMWC

1/21/2002

FT.com | People | Lunch

Page 2 of 4

and, for all the controversy that his name inspires, he has achieved a serene,
almost supernatural status that the Japanese formally define as "national living
treasure".

He recently completed an amusing post-World Trade Center advertisement for
New York City in which a body double ran around the bases at Yankee
stadium and dived for home plate. The real Kissinger then dusted himself off,
and fellow Americans were exhorted to experience the miracle of New York.

Having dusted himself off a few times in the past four decades, he is courting
trouble again with the next book, which collects his writings on the Vietnam
war, "puts them in sequence and adapts them". He knows that the work, due
out in June, "will not meet with universal acclamation".

"There's one problem about the Nixon period - the passions you encounter in people who have nurtured hatred for 30 years. It's almost impossible to get any writer to write understandingly about that period."

Kissinger suggested that "you can't duck the history", which seemed to imply,
unusually, that he may have been wrong at the time, but it became clear that
he meant the opposite: "Eventually somebody will write a history of the period
in which I served which is based on documents and not on anecdotes."

While he enjoys the attention, particularly when executives pay generously for
the privilege of his thoughts, he conceded that it is "biologically inevitable" that
importance diminishes with time. "You are fated. This is something you have
to come to terms with when you get to your 70s. It will destroy you if you start
fretting about it."

What do you fret about?

"Not my importance. You read these stories about how I plotted all my life to
become security adviser. I was a political adviser to Nelson Rockefeller in
three campaigns against Richard Nixon. The probability of my becoming
security adviser to Richard Nixon was not high - or if it was, it was an example
of extraordinary deviousness."

By coincidence and not extraordinary deviousness, we had both chosen the
club's special bean soup, which was almost a reason to join the Brook, and a
delicately grilled snapper.

The moment of truth for the Kissinger calorie count came when he had to
decide how many spoonfuls of olive-based sauce would be ladled over the
fish. He exercised self-restraint - unlike Bill Clinton.

"I criticised Clinton in my book - I regret having attacked him, but it was written
in that period. I regret it from the point of view that I was concentrating on the
principles of foreign policy and not personality."

Was he surprised that the colossus Clinton had been so quickly forgotten?

"He left nothing lasting. Not even lasting personal attachments. There is no
Clinton cult like there was a Kennedy cult. He really reflected the last flowering
of the self-indulgent side of the Vietnam protests. And he had a curious lack of
sense of responsibility to the nation - he was more geared to himself.

There will be a few tips for Clinton and George W. Bush in another work in
progress: "What I will do next is on the nature of statemanship. It will be more
philosophical. I will call it The Statesman, a title based on Machiavelli's *The
Prince*."

The precis prompted a question about which statesmen or women he would

1/21/2002

FT.com | People | Lunch

Page 3 of 4

People use as models for the work.

People home

People in focus index

Dossier index

People on the move

"It is not a history of what others have thought. It is what I think about the nature of statesmanship." Expect a trim 200 or so pages and better-than-average non-fiction writing.

"Rudy Giuliani told me that he is planning to write two books at the same time. I told him that it takes a lot of effort to write one book. It's difficult."

FT Ski

FT.com
FINANCIAL TIMES

There is a clue to Kissinger in that answer. As paid "oracle", the presumption is often that his thoughts are the other-worldly revelations of a soothsayer, but Kissinger is a diviner of pragmatic permutations. Pick a topic, any lofty topic, and there is an answer that is profound for being prosaic.

More from FT.com

EMAIL & MOBILE NEWS

FT Mobile

Get news & alerts

Personal office

Desktop news ticker

Can the political convergence between Moscow and Washington continue? "Putin knows that Russia will be too weak to sustain a strategic competition with the US, so this convergence can last for the foreseeable future."

FINANCE & INVESTING

Markets home

Global investing

FTyourmoney

FT Investor

CBS MarketWatch

Investors Chronicle

FT Fund Ratings

China? "With China you get a philosophical problem. There are people who think that China is bound to challenge the US, therefore it is in our interests to have the confrontation now. I think Washington is moving toward a non-confrontational approach, but not with the same conviction that it has about the Russian relationship."

French exceptionalism? "Some of the French arguments I have a bit of sympathy for. We have a tendency to treat countries as if they were subsidiary members of a giant corporation. For the French, the question of identity is an important question...they are counting on our rationality not to let disputes go beyond a certain point."

CAREERS

FTCareerPoint

Business Education

Working at FT

Tony Blair's embrace of the US cause? "I was pleasantly surprised but it also makes sense. He could be engaged in a manoeuvre in which he first demonstrates the utility of Britain to America but also to Europe as a bridge to America. He could then use that as a second base to strengthen his European connections. It seems to me that is what he is doing."

SPORTS

Sports news & results

The future of Europe? "There are going to be so many different versions of Europe. When Europe expands to 26 nations it really is working counter to the ideal of strong unification. There is a fundamental contradiction between expanding and deepening."

SPECIAL EVENTS

Special reports

FT Surveys

George W. Bush's leadership in recent months? "Much better than Clinton or Gore would have done. An attack on American soil for a Texan is a shaping influence. He now has a clear sense of mission. He is an acute judge of people and has moved with unexpected subtlety."

ALSO

Creative Business

People in the news

Time Off

FT Expat

askFT

FTProperty

Compelling and comprehensive, though not necessarily always correct. George W. Bush is not really a Texan and he had his goal defined for him last year - the true test of his subtlety will come in the next few months.

Anyway, everything is fair game for Kissinger - well, almost everything. He paused for a moment and confided: "This is surely not permitted." I presumed that we had inadvertently broken another Brook Club by-law or that he was going to reveal a long-hidden secret of state.

Partner sites

Business.com

Hoover's Online

Les Echos

FT Deutschland

Recoletos

Vedomosti

It was something far more sensitive... the diplomacy of dieting. Having already polished off a pair of biscotti, he reached out to the plate of after-lunch chocolates: "My wife reads about this and I am in deep trouble."

1/21/2002

FT.com | TotalSearch | Global Archive | Article

Page 1 of 5

STAY ON TOP OF
GLOBAL NEWS

Subscribe now

Make FT.com your homepage

Monday Jan 21 2002 All tim

TotalSearch

All sources

Global | UK | US

News

Markets

Industries

Co

FT.com > TotalSearch > Global Archive > Article

TOTALSEARCH | GLOBAL ARCHIVE

1. THE FRONT LINE: Brook Club

new search

back to results

refine search

THE FRONT LINE: Brook Club

Financial Times; Jan 19, 2002

Having written a generally favourable review of his last work, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, I wondered self-consciously whether this had prompted him to agree to lunch. Kissinger, however, could only vaguely recall the piece and observed with deft, dry understatement that "I tend to remember grievances" more than compliments.

Share p

Enter Sy

Select C

MY PORT
Manage
company

Registra

Sign up
Edit your

Useful t

Book your
current
get map
get wea
Free Ann

Request

Buy
ser

Help

help page

http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020119001703&query=kissinger 1/21/2002

Page 2 of 5

With the diplomatic arts back in fashion, Kissinger's thoughts are in demand and, for all the controversy that his name inspires, he has achieved a serene, almost supernatural status that the Japanese formally define as "national living treasure".

What do you fret about?

"I criticised Clinton in my book -I regret having attacked him, but it was written in that period. I regret it from the point of view that I was concentrating on the principles of foreign policy and not personality."

1/21/2002

Page 3 of 5

There will be a few tips for Clinton and George W. Bush in another work in progress: "What I will do next is on the nature of statemanship. It will be more philosophical. I will call it The Statesman, a title based on Machiavelli's The Prince."

The precis prompted a question about which statesmen or women he would use as models for the work.

French exceptionalism? "Some of the French arguments I have a bit of sympathy for. We have a tendency to treat countries as if they were subsidiary members of a giant corporation. For the French, the question of identity is an important question. . . they are counting on our rationality not to let disputes go beyond a certain point."

1/21/2002

Page 4 of 5

TotalSearch

TotalSearch home

Global archive

FT-only search

Web guide

Research team

People Dossiers

FT Ski

FT.com
FINANCIAL TIMES

Company finder

HOOVER'S
OLIVE
COAL

Get free company, financial
and competitor information.

Enter company name or
ticker.

For further company
information click here.

More from FT.com

EMAIL & MOBILE NEWS

FT Mobile

Get news & alerts

Personal office

Desktop news ticker

FINANCE & INVESTING

Markets home

Global investing

FTyourmoney

FT Investor

CBS MarketWatch

Investors Chronicle

FT Fund Ratings

CAREERS

FTCareerPoint

Business Education

Working at FT

SPORTS

Sports news & results

SPECIAL EVENTS

Special reports

FT Surveys

ALSO

Creative Business

People in the news

Time Off

FT Expat

askFT

FTProperty

It was something far more sensitive ... the diplomacy of dieting. Having already polished off a pair of biscotti, he reached out to the plate of after-lunch chocolates: "My wife reads about this and I am in deep trouble."

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 1995-1998

PRINT THIS ARTICLE