A conversation between BERNARD LEVIN
and DR. HENRY KISSINGER

BL

American history is largely made up of individual success stories but there have been few to compare with this one. The man who arrived as an unknown youth, a refugee from Nazi-ism and rose to become one of the most powerful men in the land and to help shape the course of modern history, Henry Kissinger.

Was that the drive of your ambition, the
need to succeed in a land where you were
among strangers - it often has been, you'll
agree.

HK

Well, it was certainly an influence on my life, but the idea of becoming Secretary of State of a major political force in the United States quite literally had never crossed my mind, and even when I was appointed by President Nixon when he invited me for an interview after his election, indeed its manner is to speak very elliptically, I knew he had offered some position but I didn't know which and I thought it was Head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department which was about five levels below that of the Security Adviser so whatever the impact of my youth, it did not generate a drive towards high political office.

BL

What did you want first?
You, you had an academic career of course,
is that what you really wanted?

HK

I, er, when I came to the United States
I had to work in a shaving brush factory
because we had to go to night school even
for High School, and then for college

so before the War my ambitions were
extremely modest, I was studying to be an
accountant, er, after the War when I
received a scholarship to go to Harvard
my ambition was to be a professor; I took
an interest in contemporary affairs, I had
always been interested in foreign policy
partly from an historical point of view,
partly from a contemporary point of view,
but quite literally until 1969 it never
occurred to me that I would be an actor,
let alone a principal actor, I had never
held a press conference of any sort until
1969.

BL Well you seem to have taken to it very
naturally, I must say..

HK Yes, I received a lot of credit for handling
the press with..skillfully, and people asked
me how I learned it..the fact is I simply
started, I didn't learn it.

BL That historical background you spoke of a
moment ago clearly is also a very very
important part in your thinking isn't it?
It, er...and you always struck me as
having an almost Shakespearean horror of
anarchy and social disintegration, is that the
European background?

HK Well, I think the horror of anarchy
and social disintegration derives in part
from my youth, having seen it and having
learned that societies can collapse
and civilisation can collapse. My original
plan in, for my academic writing was

to deal with the nineteenth century up
to the outbreak of World War I, about the
construction of peace and the collapse of
a peaceful order, that's why I started
writing on Metternich but that was supposed
to be the prelude to a long and extended
series of works of the notions of
international stability and the peace,
derived more from my academic work, the
consciousness that societies can take a
very evil turn, and would have to ascribe
to my youth...but Americans, and this separates
me from many Americans who have never
seen it, can't imagine it.

BL Yes, that's very clear, but um, at some
point you must have seen that the great
powerful figures of your historical studies
were fascinating to you as men, Metternich, you
mentioned Metternich, Bismarck, Castlereagh,
these are people you've written about, and
clearly..I mean do you identify with any of
them at all.....

HK That's usually said, but I don't identify..
how can I identify with Metternich...
Rhenish aristocrat, speaking French,
governing a German state...

BL Very cunning, very skilful and very
successful.

HK Yes, the problems he had to deal with.

BL Right.

HK If one asks oneself how can one learn
anything about international affairs, the
only thing one can learn is really history,
from history...it isn't an automatic

lesson, but the problem of equilibrium, er
the problem of what it is worth fighting for,
er, not the content, but the fact that there
has to be something and the impact of
personality on events, these are all, can be
studied in history, and one of the most
fascinating aspects is the relationship of
personalities on events because each,
all contemporaries have the same information
available to them, but in each generation
there are only a few who distil this into
a perception of the future, and..but what
the limits of this are and how you reconcile
this with democracy, this is a big
philosophical problem for our period.

BL

Were there any people, any individuals who
influenced you enough to shape your thinking..
I don't mean the historical figures, but
teachers, mentors, did you have any?

HK

Yes, I er, I had one, somebody picked me
up when I was a military service aide, a
man totally unknown called Fritz Kraemer,
er, German origin, but not Jewish, he did
not have to leave, he left; extremely
conservative but I met him in the Army when
I was 18 and he said to me 'You have a
first class political mind, you ought to use
it', which had never occurred to me
at the time, and he took a great interest in
me...he has since disavowed me because he
thinks I am too flexible in negotiations with
the Soviet Union and he is an extreme,
an extremely hard line and rigid on this
subject, but he was a great influence on my
life. There's a Professor at Harvard, a
Professor Elliott who er ...helped influence

my interest in political theory, er and
in the political field there was
Nelson Rockefeller who was a very great
influence on teaching me something of the
intangibles of the political process, as
indeed the political process..these were
major figures in my life.

BL

Well the figures, the historical figures
we've talked about a little, I
it's interesting that those great foxes
who ruled Europe for centuries, Richelieu
to Adenauer if you like,
it's a figure that really doesn't exist
in the United States, does it?

HK

That's right

BL

There have been great figures in the
United States but not that kind of er,
that kind of subtle mind, I suppose
that is shaped by centuries of history.

HK

Well, and also we never had the problems
of Europeans. Europeans lived with rather
narrow margins of safety - no British
statesman could afford to say let the
continent fall under the domination of a
major power, and we will then see whether it
has good-will towards us. Because if it
turned out that it didn't have good-will
towards Britain it would be too late for
Britain to react, so British
policy through centuries was to prevent the
continent from being dominated by a major
power regardless of what Britain thought

of its domestic structure. Americans
have had a much wider margin of safety,
they could let the events happen and so
Americans find it very hard to believe,
to live in a world which has neither peace
nor war, in which there is every problem,
every problem you solve is an admission
prize for someother difficulty, and this
sense of continuity, this sense of ambiguity
where the Soviet Union is both adversary
and negotiating partner - it goes down very
hard. The Liberals and Conservatives are
both united in the proposition that there
must be a terminal point. The Liberals
believing that good will supplies its remedy,
the Conservatives arguing that if only the
trumpet is clear enough the walls of Jericho
will collapse automatically and you're quite
right it's this sense of complexity that
Europeans have that doesn't exist in America.

BL

It's a kind of - I don't use the word pejoratively, though it can be, it's a kind of innocence isn't it?

HK

It's a kind of good innocence because it
also leads to great efforts, every problem
being believed to be soluable...

BL

But then it must lead to repeated disappointment.

HK

It leads to repeated disappointments, and
I believe that in the next twenty years or
so we will be driven to a more European

- 6 -

approach to foreign policies simply
because we are no longer so predominant
in the world that we can wait for lack
of ambiguity, we must now act in complex
situations and therefore in a relativistic
way.

BL

You once said something, wrote something,
and you quoted a marvellous remark of
Bismarck's that 'we must listen for the
footsteps of history and then try to
follow in them', well today...

HK

Well, what's even more complicated, he said
'if you listen carefully you can'...I don't
remember the exact phrase, you you can
'hear the rustle of the mantle of God
in the footsteps of history and if you
are fortunate you can get hold of a little
corner of it'.

BL

Well of course that is a perfect definition
of the European spirit we are talking about,
we you....can only just get hold of the corner
rather than grasp the whole thing....but
in fact if you look at the world today
and after all you've done a good
deal looking at the world today, um, there's
a terrible paradox here/in that if you look
at the Soviet Union, never mind the countries
of her Empire, here is a country which is
in every conceivable respect a catastrophy,
a country whose rulers can't feed their
own people, can't allow them the smallest
particles of liberty - we ought to be able,
in the West, to make rings round them;
the fact of the matter is the balance

- 7 -

subtly and constantly, and with ups
and downs of course, tilts the other way,
why?

HK
Because, er, it's not because the
Soviet Union has a diabolical master plan
for dominating the world as so many people
think...

BL O.K.

HK
In fact, the Soviet Union operates as a
monolith and we are divided so in economic
negotiations, or most negotiations, they
can play off various part of the industrial
world, industrial democracies against
each other; second the Soviet Union, while
not brilliant in their diplomacy, is
extremely persistent, while the West, when
it has a position, whatever its position
is, after six months of deadlock you will
get ideas that the deadlock has to be broken
by some Western initiative, so that the
Soviets can collect concessions over an
extended period of time whose cumulative
effect is significant even if any one of
them is marginal, er, the Soviet successes,
such as they are, are really a reflection
of the spiritual exhaustion of the West;
it ought to be possible, intellectually it
will never be explicable, why the countries
that had all the resources could not
combine for long enough to bring about
a major negotiation, and when we speak of
long enough we are speaking not of twenty
years, we are speaking of maybe five
years, there is a leadership struggle
inevitably coming in the Soviet Union

it must be about priorities, it can't
be about anything else, and it must be
between those who think they can have
everything and aggressive foreign policy
and economic co-operation with the West,
and those who think other priorities must
be set. That we cannot influence this
is really a criticism of our own...of the
tendency to put immediate domestic
considerations before even the medium range
perspective.

BL Well, not only can we not influence it,
we seem to be unable, in a position, unable
to take advantage of it even...

HK That's right...

BL Well then you see you...

HK ...the Soviet Union needs us to feed its
party line

BL Right

HK It needs our credit and it needs our
technology..

BL Yours anyway..

HK And its, so it is inexplicable that we
deal with this as a strictly market
phenomenon...more than that, in fact if
we dealt with it as a market phenomenon

we'd be all right, but we extend credits
to enable the Soviet Union to do what it
can never do for itself.

BL Is this the price of detente then, are
we paying...

HK No I think it isn't the price of detente,
it is something, it is the price of not
understanding that, because the opposite
of detente er..comes from confrontation,
leads to the laws of public support and
to constant crises in the domestic
structures, what is needed is a willingness
to resist Soviet expansionism where it occurs,
to be very tough towards Soviet aggressiveness
but to put before the Soviets in some
negotiation: a vision of the world that they
can have if they stay within their own borders
and if they agree to major disarmament
agreements, but nobody has been willing to do
this and detente tends to be interpreted as
a kind of psycho-therapy where you, where
the mere fact that you talked to the Soviets,
regardless of content, is supposed to supply
its own calming tendencies; that version of
detente is of course dangerous, but that
there must be some diplomatic contact with
the Soviet Union if we had confidence in
ourselves and some notion of what we
want to build, I think it would not only be
manageable but it is essential.

BL There's a very good symbol of the
failure you've been speaking about in
the present, very rapidly, as far as I can
see, very rapidly growing um..the

movement for unilateral disarmament,
nuclear disarmament, does that worry you..
I mean... fundamentally, obviously it must..

HK

....we are rapidly moving into a position
where the defense of the West is based
on nuclear weapons because no Government
has wanted to make the efforts for
another strategy, the
populations are being assailed by
nuclear pacifism, conventional forces are
not being built up, that must lead to a
catastrophe somewhere down the road.

BL

Well there's a ....

HK

This is in effect unilateral disarmament
even though the appeals are theoretically
directed to both sides, they are not heard
on the other side..

BL

In practise that is obviously so, but then
that seems to be a spectacular forgetfullness
of the lessons of history, and lessons of
very modern history at that.

HK

I would have to say that one of the...
it, that, it is not the result of detente
as such because one of the reasons
there has been impetus given is because
it was believed by many well meaning people
that we in America were too callous
on the question of nuclear war and
engaged in too easy confrontation of
rhetoric, so we probably could have

pre-empted some of this agitation by
putting forward complete proposals earlier,
something we are now rectifying.

BL Um, um. You said once that Vietnam
taught America that while her power was
infinite, power was great, it was not
infinite.

HK Yes.

BL Now what's been the result of that hard
learned lesson in that respect?

HK Well unfortunately the lesson has not
been learned as a hard lesson, the lesson
has been simplified in our domestic debate
between those because those who opposed
the War in Vietnam had turned it totally
into a moral issue about the criminal, or
at least psychiatrically unbalanced
propensities of those who found themselves
having to conduct the war. This of course
begs the principal question. The people
who entered the war, who preceded the
administration which I served had perfectly
rational and even moral motives, in the
tradition of American foreign policy of
resisting aggression they did not
calculate as they should have, the
relationship of means to ends, and there's
no doubt that they resisted an evil system
but they staked more and they were not
willing to risk enough than was good for
our world position, but that aspect
of the Vietnam War, the relation of ends
to means, when American military powers
should be at stake, that is being drowned