2002 McCloy Awards Dinner

DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER

Guido, ladies and gentlemen, I was in Munich yesterday – in fact, I was in Munich this morning – but yesterday afternoon I was watching the football game between Germany and South Korea. And to watch a football team with a German group requires great emotional fortitude, because if Germany is not ahead by the 75th minute, a great melancholy settles over the group, which becomes convinced that life is forever unjust. But luckily Germany scored yesterday in the 75th minute. This morning, at the airport, I met former President Dr. Roman Herzog – we ran into each other. We had met many times before, and he said, “You remember when we saw the football game together in the last World Cup against Croatia?” – which unfortunately Germany lost, so that was a melancholy experience. But of all the things I had encountered with Dr. Herzog, the thing that stuck most in his mind was the football game we saw together.

Now, I want to say a few words about the man in whose honor the dinner is named, and whose son and daughter-in-law are here. John McCloy was a great American and a great American type. He lived in a period in which America became involved in international affairs. But he still knew people who had fought in the Civil War, and had fought the Indians on the Plains, and so he had very deep roots in this country. In fact, when I was appointed National Security Advisor, I called on John McCloy, who was already an elder statesman, and asked for some guidance. And he said: “You think you know a lot about foreign policy. But you don't know anything about America. So start taking vacations in Colorado, and I'll get you some people that can help you.” And John McCloy did this with an attitude not of any condescension, but with the attitude that service to the country and service to the cause to freedom was the noblest task that could be assigned to anybody. He served every American President from World War II until the time of his death. He never had a Cabinet position, but he was a trusted counselor to American statesmen of both parties.

Once when I came back from a negotiation, I invited him to Washington to have a drink with me just to exchange ideas with him – something I almost always did when I came back from a negotiation. As always, he came, spent an hour with me, and returned to

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New York. It was many months later that I found out that he was missing his 80th-birthday party. And I said to him afterwards, "Why didn't you tell me? We could have made it the next night." He said, "You're so much busier than I am, and you have so many responsibilities, that if I can be of some help, I'm not going to tell you that I prefer to go to a party."

John McCloy brought this dedication and this commitment to relations with Germany. He became High Commissioner at a period that most people in this room cannot possibly remember. When one saw Germany in the 1940s, one could not imagine physically how rebuilding could start. And the moral courage to start again. And to start it with a functioning and ever-stronger democracy. It is one of the great achievements of our period. John McCloy came as High Commissioner, which meant that we were still occupying Germany. And Adenauer became Chancellor. The journey that Germany took from those days to today is one of the great success stories of democratic cooperation.

After John McCloy left, he remained committed to the close relationship with Germany. And it overlapped my own experiences. Of course, I was born in Germany – and as a result, I speak no language without an accent, because in Germany I speak with a Franconian accent. But to me, the part of my experience in Germany, which goes back now all of my life, that has been most important is the postwar period and the participation I have been honored to have in some of the actions of the postwar period.

The first head of government I ever met was Konrad Adenauer. I was a very young man. This was in 1956, and he said to me, "Now remember, Professor Kissinger, China and Russia are going to split, and that is something we should be talking about." I thought he was totally mad. I had never considered that idea. Five years later, he came to Washington, and I was at that time a part-time consultant to President Kennedy. He said to President Kennedy, "Now remember, Mr. President, China and the Soviet Union are going to split, and Professor Kissinger agrees with me." So I got a note from President Kennedy that said, "It would be nice if you occasionally talk to me."

2002 McCloy Awards Dinner

At this moment, relations between Europe and the United States are the most complex that I have seen in this period. That does not mean that there have not been disagreements before. If I can tell another Adenauer story – President Kennedy sent me in 1962 to see him because he had heard that Chancellor Adenauer did not agree with some of Washington's views on Berlin. I began to talk, and Adenauer said: "They've already told me this in Washington. It did not impress me there. Why did they think it would impress me here?" So I said, "Now, Mr. Chancellor, I am a professor, I do not have to come here at all. At least you could let me finish what I have come to say." Adenauer never lost his composure. He said, "Tell me, professor, how much of your time are you spending in Washington?" I said, "Oh, maybe a quarter of my time." He said, "Then we have a simple problem. I will assume you are telling me three-quarters of the truth." So I say this only to show that disagreements have occurred before. We have seen them during the missile period, some of you may have heard former Chancellor Schmidt express his views about the inadequacies of various American statesmen. And there have been Americans who have not agreed with everything that was done in Germany. But the difference between the previous period and the current period is, in the previous period, there were family quarrels. There was an agreement on common objectives; the conflicts, such as they were, concerned means of achieving fundamentally agreed goals. There was a genuine sense of being part of the same family.

Occasionally, this still exists today. I was in Germany on September 11. And I could not leave, obviously. And I must say, the outpouring of emotion of the ordinary Germans I came in touch with and also German friends over the next few days, in expressing their real sympathy, show the extraordinary connection that had been built up in the lifetime that I have seen in German-American relations. Also, who would have thought it possible that German troops would be sent to Afghanistan, outside the NATO area? And the contribution that Germany has made in the struggle against terrorism is one that Americans deeply appreciate and should deeply appreciate.

And yet having said all of this – as somebody who reads the German press regularly, more frequently during the football season, but regularly even outside the football season

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– there is now a tone in the dialogue which is unprecedented. Too many in the intellectual community are listing death penalties, excesses that may occur or are imagined, as if these were attributes of American society. On the American side, the worrisome thing is not so much hostility towards Europe, but indifference towards Europe – a sense that there is no longer that feeling that our destiny is inextricably connected. The governments are still working together quite effectively, and the meetings between Presidents and Chancellors, and Presidents and other European leaders, very rarely lead to open disagreements, but there is, in my observation, no longer that sense that animated leaders and peoples as long as the Cold War was creating a common danger.

Now, in a way, that is inevitable. There are no clear-cut common dangers, and foreign policy has become global in a way it was not before. So inevitably there arrive difficulties that would have been considered out of proportion in a previous period. But there is, if one looks at the big issues that are facing America today – I would say that on such things as Iraq – the European attitude that is like going to the dentist. They will sort of acquiesce in what we are doing, but there is no real sense of community with respect to it. And I think the same is true in relation to the Palestinian issue. I am not here now to argue that America is right and Europe is wrong. I rather want to emphasize the fundamental challenge that as one looks at what is ahead of us, in the Islamic world, in parts of Asia, in the nature of global cooperation, we have to find a sense of community and a sense of common destiny again.

It is for this reason that I believe that an organization like the American Council on Germany is particularly important at this moment. The relationship between Germany and the United States, which started 50 years ago in conflict, led to tremendous achievements in rebuilding and then winning German unification while remaining a part of the rest of the alliance. That achievement has to be continued not simply in grudging compromises on individual issues, but in some common understanding of what is ahead of us, and how to deal with the fundamental issues before us. In succession, German Chancellors and American Presidents have managed to achieve this. But as Europe is unifying, and as Europe achieves its own identity, it becomes particularly important that

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this identity not be defined primarily by what distinguishes it from the United States. And
on the American side, that Europe is not conceived as something that has to be
periodically tranquilized and for which one finds adequate phrases in speeches, but
something by which we really work as an expression of common needs.

I thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk to you. This is what John McCloy stood for, what he practiced all his life, and what he would surely have considered, as he considered all of the tasks before the free world, as an opportunity, as a challenge, and as a means to fulfill all of the values that we own together. Thank you very much.